I'm the Operations Manager in the CSC.

We look at both written and verbal support that we provide for quality purposes. Currently the survey does only go out for calls in, however we are looking at adding tickets, although this will probably not be until the start of next year.

We currently have the "Smiley Face" reporting on tickets. This is where customers rate their response with a happy, unhappy or neutral face. We look at the unhappy report on a daily basis. All training needs are identified and our quality team or the manager themselves will educate the respective analyst or the department if needs be.

One of my managers is finalising a blog on ticket response times and ticket pools, this should be out in the next few days.

If you have any specific examples of recent tickets with bad responses I will happily look at them if you email them to me or the Comms Team.

I agree with James, it is a little worrying that the tickets are not part of the survey. Ticket response time is much better now. The sample of calls is so low I am not sure how relevant the results can be.

I must be the unlucky small percentage but everytime I contact support by ticket I get lax responses like they don't care about support. They do not know their product. As time has gone on I have tried to phrase my questions very clearly and provided Plusnet site references but still they don't read, don't care and don't have the knowledge to answer questions.

The next phase is really annoying. You respond and say please check your response and please read the question. Sometimes they reply with the same answer - der!!

After several attempts at this I try and escalate the question to the intelligent next tier or management. This is not done, they refuse to pass it up. I start a new ticket as a direct complaint to management and the idiot who couldn't care the first few times answers the question - what!!!

The ticket eventually gets answered but it is hard work. My impression is that support staff are unsure of referals and the phone option. Any question in this area seems to cause a problem.

I think the support is better by phone as the dialogue to a result is quicker.

Perhaps you should introduce a system that gives a free months service when support fail to answer questions adequately after the customer has tried 3 times. This will be a very visable and painful measure of quality. I would be enjoying a free connection if that were the case.

I know you are trying but more effort is required. I think it is an attitude issue. It is too easy to get rid of a question rather than answer it.

I think Plusnet is a great product let down by its support. The Member centre should win awardsfor design and great access to your account. The bad news is I can see where the problem is but the support staff don't understand their product. If I could put it right myself I would, it would be quicker. I have to train the support staff so they know where to look and then fix it. I don't think I should have to do this. More pride in your work is required by the support staff.

As per my reply to Mike previously, speed faults can be hard to diagnose and resolve, especially with the wholesale design of MaxDSL.

I've had a quick look over your account and it appears that your line is fluctuating between 1 and 2Mb. This appears to be the current limit on your line unfortunately.

I have a ticket raised 15 April and still outstanding. It has been going round in circles and I am becoming increasingly frustrated.

In a recent instalment your representative asked me to disconnect my telephone and plug the modem directly into the engineer's socket so that he could run a test on the connection. I really thought that finally I was getting somewhere. But after 3 days of waiting for this test to be carried out, I finally got a message that my connection was much better, but there was no indication that any test had been carried out. The connection did in fact get better, but only for a few hours!

It appears that support staff do not read previous entries in the question log, and will grasp at any straw to be able to suggest that the problem might have just gone away - presumably on of its own accord.

Up until this I had been very impressed with PlusNet for your honesty, openness, and for treating customers as intelligent adults. Unfortunately that impression has been completely wiped away. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the most critical test of any ISP is how well it resolves faults. Sadly for me, PlusNet is currently failing very badly.

Speed faults can be tricky to pin down, there can be a number of factors involved. The figure of 576kpbs, is that the throughput you are seeing or the sync speed? I'd be happy to look into this issue for you, can you let me know a ticket number from your account and I'll investigate.

It might also be worth having a read of Jameseh's speed fault blog which gives some fantastic information on the problems encountered:-
http://community.plus.net/comms/2007/07/02/broadband-speed-faults-how-to-diagnose/

IIRC you asked a similar question on last months survey, I'll paste my answer in below for you.
The questions are structured to ascertain how the agent performed on the phone, some of the questions would be irrelevant for ticket responses.
When customers close the ticket after the issue is resolved they can rate the response and add comments if required, these are picked up and checked for quality to ensure that any poor rated tickets are improved in future.

@Steve

Sorry to hear that you had a poor experience with our support team, the calls are monitored frequently to ensure customers are receiving the best support they can.
We don't use scripts, however in certain cases (such as fault troubleshooting) there are standard tests required before we can raise a fault to BT.
If you'd like to PM me the username of the account in question and let me know what the issue was that we couldn't resolve I'd be more than happy to look into this for you. Alternatively if you aren't a member on the forums yet if you could paste a ticket number from your account in reply to this comment I'll pick this up.