What happened to "No problem Sir?"

[#1]

I've been a loyal PlusNet customer for more years than I can remember - certainly more than 15 I'd guess - and I've recommended more than a hundred new customers in that time.  All because I had a belief in the service provided by PlusNet.

However, over recent years, in my view, the level of customer service has begun to search depths that I had never thought possible.  In the early days telephone wait times were mercilessly small and I recall you could even access a web cam to see the person you were talking to.  Now, the wait times are intolerable for the most part and only bad at other times - and you get through to a first level support person who knows very little of the technical goings on of a state-of-the-art Internet Service Provider.

Worse than that, there is no opportunity to get passed up the line to anyone more knowledgeable and you're stuck with someone being e-mailed who might get around to looking at the problem, possibly poorly relayed by the first agent.

Today I had a 38 minute discussion with a very nice, but ill-informed lady trying to get an IPS Tag changed because of PlusNet's inability/unwillingness to add TXT records to a DNS or even change the Nameserver for a domain.  The conversation ranged from "we can't do that" to, eventually, "I'll pass the request on to Networks"  

All this added to what is demonstrably one of the poorest e-mail system in the World with no security and virtually no storage I feel my time with PlusNet is rapidly coming to an end.  With Vodafone offering 100Mb fibre broadband for £23/month the PlusNet adage of "No problem Sir!" needs to be resurrected - better sooner rather than later.

[#2]

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@computamedic wrote:

I feel my time with PlusNet is rapidly coming to an end.  With Vodafone offering 100Mb fibre broadband for £23/month the PlusNet adage of "No problem Sir!" needs to be resurrected - better sooner rather than later.

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If you go down that route, I hope your experience is better than mine before I came here. Heavily congested backhaul and the guaranteed speed only applies to sync and not throughput. Some exchanges are obviously better equipped than others, but there were quite a few customers leaving under the 30 day guarantee.

Mark

[#3]

Sorry to hear about the issues you've had.

We're aware the wait times are high and we're working on bringing them down.

With regards to the issues you've raised I'm afraid that as such a small number of our customers have webspace and domains it's not feasible for us to train every advisor on a query they might receive once a year.

[#4]

Matthew,

I fully appreciate your point but it begs the question "Why do you involve yourself".  I can appreciate that your core business is as a retail service provider so why bother handling web space and domains at all.  Either leave that stuff to the companies who are set up to handle it OR at least have the facility for the Support Agent to pass the call through to someone who can.  By your own admission, it's not a common occurrence so the extra workload for that second level support is unlikely to be  excessive.

I don't want to spend anything up to 40 minutes waiting to talk to first level support and then spend half and hour arguing about what can and can't be done.  Get them to offload the query to second level support and get back to helping users with the more mundane issues.  Surely it's a win-win situation.

As I'm sure you realise, Technical Support is what sets the men from the boys and Plus Net has historically always performed well in that department but over recent years the performance has declined miserably.  Customers may expect to wait for ages to talk to Sky, Talktalk or BT Internet but it's a disappointment to find that PlusNet are no better. 

[#5]

Mark,

Was your experience with Vodafone's ADSL service or with their Fibre offering??  In Milton Keynes Vodafone are in the process of installing a dedicated fibre network in cooperation with CityFibre offering connections speeds between 100Mb/s and 900Mb/s.  One would imagine that the backhaul support for that would be different to that provided for that through the BT exchanges.  Time will tell. 

[#6]

Fibre, on their up to 76meg offering with a 55meg guarantee. Speeds sometimes crawled down to 6meg in peak with a 49 meg sync. The throughput stayed at around 20 meg at most times, very rarely going anywhere near the top end, until about a week before mt migration out completed. Because of the 49 sync (which was below the 55meg guarantee), there was no problem in the eyes of Vodafone. Of course, their forum is only filled with issues (the same as other forums), not much from the happy people.

Mark

[#7]

The 76Mb/s VDSL fibre service is provided through BT's FTTC service.  The technology used through CityFibre's full fibre-to-the-premises service is very different so it remains to be seen how that performs.

[#8]

They probably didn't purchase enough bandwidth, as the connection ran flat out before I migrated from BT. It was a very similar experience to when I went with SSE a few years ago, they too didn't fork out the dosh for the backhaul, but kept adding customers.