Support personnel support

[#1]

I make a living providing support for companies and (in some cases) individuals who do not want to deal with technical matters or helplines. Over the past few years, I have set up a number of people with Business and Residential connections. Its always been a pleasure as the rules of engagement have been relatively clear. As long as I phone in with the right username, password, address or Phone number - I can enquire, report issues with or make changes to an account.
Has something changed in the past week or so that means now I have to be "listed as an authorised contact"?
I have just had a rather frustrating phone call with support reference a question asked via the ticket system telling me I had to call in. (69950357) In spite of having the above information, I was not allowed to make the call; rather update the question system asking to have my name "added". Apparently the agent "could not speak to me whilst I asked the question online". As an aside, the primary contact left months ago.
It seems a bit churlish to have me do this when I have all of the right info to hand and am calling with respect to question already made on the account.
Of course - a few minutes later I get: "I have added (my name) as an authorised user. However I am unable to change the main account holder name. This can happen whilst the account is being switched over to Business however but would require both parties on the call in order for this to take place."
If its a change, let me know, as I have a number of customers (30+) I will need to action adding me as an authorised contact. Which frankly, is a pain.

[#2]

This is a good question - how / when has this change been communicated out to users?
The very characteristic of PNs user acquisition through referrals leads to a situation where many users rely on their referrer to handle technical problems, sometimes remotely.  What will be the impact of this practise in such situations?
In any case, how does PN know if they are talking to the account holder or their technical support representative?  Surely knowledge of the account and security details ought to be enough?
Kevin

[#3]

Out of curiosity Chrism2, are all these (30+) on your account as referrals as well?
I take it that was business support you spoke to, and it strikes me that the agent you were speaking was not being particularly helpful. refusing to speak to someone, especially a business customer who already pays over the odds for a better SLA and Support, it seems to me it's somewhat unacceptable, not just churlish.

[#4]

Recently I signed up my mother-in-law to PN and  later had to get myself authorised to manage her account (after asking her permission).

[#5]

This is down to change in the process of how we validate accounts from a security point of view. It's the first part of a phased change where the second change will be to only validate when we actually need to (ie: checking billing and payment information, etc).
We will no longer pass security on someone who is not the account holder, nor is an authorised user on the account (we were given this steer from our legal team). We haven't notified everyone of this as firstly, we didn't notifiy people what our policy was on this in the first place and secondly, this would probably cause about 100,000 people to call in which would mean that genuine support calls would suffer dramatically. (By this I mean comfortably waiting more than an hour for a call to be answered).
Chrism2 - I'm genuinely sorry for the inconvenience that this will no doubt cause you.  If tickets can be raised on the relevant accounts, we will then get you added as an authorised user.

[#6]

Just to add to the above, I've raised this in our weekly hot threads to bring to management attention.

[#7]

I personally think Plusnet should have emailed all your business customers who have referrals to advise them of the change. It can't be too difficult to explain why they shouldn't call-in and how they can do the necessary changes via ticket.
And likewise you should do the same to residential customers with referrals.
Have any changes been made to the relevant Help & Support pages to provide the relevant information on what referrals & their referrers should do now and in future when signing up a new referal?

[#8]

Quote from: Matt

Just to add to the above, I've raised this in our weekly hot threads to bring to management attention.

@Matt -
Can you add the related issue (user security authorization for in-account payments) in this thread - http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,114733 to your weekly hot threads for management attention.  Thanks