topic Re: auction for altzeimers in Plusnet Feedback

auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:51:00 GMT

Rather than spending money on projects like this, how about you try spending it on improving the service you provide. If you did this, you may actually be able to provide the service that people are paying for and in turn, they will recomend you to others. As a result of the way you handled my issues, I will be recomending that people stay as far away from you as possible. If however, you had spent the money to improve my service, you would no doubt have alot more customers in this area, rather than people staying away as you deem it acceptable to allow a paying customer to go 6 weeks with no internet.

Re: auction for altzeimers

pierre_pierre — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 07:35:51 GMT

what the hell has that title got to do with your moans, or have you got Altzeimers?

Re: auction for altzeimers

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 08:30:46 GMT

@pierre_pierre
http://community.plus.net/blog/2011/03/29/auction-for-alzheimers-two-signed-england-cricket-bats/
and
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,94721.0.html

Re: auction for altzeimers

Strat — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:16:44 GMT

Who's to say Plusnet spent any money on it and anyway it was a cheap shot at Altzeimers sufferers and a very good cause.
Just my opinion.

Re: auction for altzeimers

pierre_pierre — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 18:33:05 GMT

Tony reading back through whats left of your threads, your only problem is that you are so far from the exchange PN and also BT cant help you, the route you have decided via satellite is your only option

Re: auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Sun, 01 May 2011 23:03:46 GMT

Quote from: pierre_pierre
Tony reading back through whats left of your threads, your only problem is that you are so far from the exchange PN and also BT cant help you, the route you have decided via satellite is your only option

It's not that they CAN'T help, it's that they WONT help. FTTC would sort the problems out. You know it, I know it, Plusnet know it and I'm sure that even my 4 year old knows it. PN are advertising THEIR fibre network. If it is theirs, why wont they help? Because they don't give a damn about the customers needs, thats why.

Re: auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Sun, 01 May 2011 23:06:21 GMT

Quote from: Strat
Who's to say Plusnet spent any money on it and anyway it was a cheap shot at Altzeimers sufferers and a very good cause.
Just my opinion.

Good cause or not, customers should be the priority, after all, we are the ones paying them each month. It was not a shot at altzeimers at all, but a shot at plusnet for wasting my money on projects like this, when they can't even provide a good internet service.

Re: auction for altzeimers

WWWombat — Mon, 02 May 2011 02:05:07 GMT

Quote from: tony8436
It's not that they CAN'T help, it's that they WONT help. FTTC would sort the problems out. You know it, I know it, Plusnet know it and I'm sure that even my 4 year old knows it. PN are advertising THEIR fibre network. If it is theirs, why wont they help?

Edit:
I typed a response to this, but decided it wasn't worth it. There's enough vitriol going around a few threads now without adding to it.

Re: auction for altzeimers

adamwalker — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:18:22 GMT

tony8436,
Tell me about the problems you're experiencing. I'm here to help.

Re: auction for altzeimers

jelv — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:34:38 GMT

Adam,
Take a look at his attenuation!

Re: auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Tue, 03 May 2011 23:25:28 GMT

@ Adam,
The problem was 6 weeks with a speed of 31Kbps. I contacted PN by phone and was told that someone would get back to me, they never did. I then phoned back and was told that I would need to raise a fault ticket (which I thought had been done with the first call). he next response was simply 'you'll have to wait upto 10 days to see if it stabalises'. It took 5 weeks before the first engineer visit was arranged. 6 weeks to the second, and another 4 days until PN sent me a text saying my profile had been reset. The first 3 weeks of the problem was just someone telling me to try another router and filter and plug into test socket. I did this the first time they told me, yet they still went down this road for 3 weeks. If they had called for an engineer after the first time, the fault could have been sorted alot quicker, but due to the incompetence and nobody talking to each other, this went on far too long and cost me alot of money. I had to travel to the nearest internet cafe, which is 20 miles away whilst my car was off the road so I had to use a taxi, total cost £50 everytime I wanted to get online, which was quite often as I had to prepare a presentation for a promotion course.
One of the CS I spoke to said I would not be billed for the time I could not access the internet, yet low and behold, I receive a text saying my payment was successful. I phoned again to ask why I had been billed and was told that the money will be refunded, but it can take upto 10 working days. What a shock, it still has not appeared in my bank. It seems that the only thing Plusnet got right through this whole fiasco was taking the money, even though they said this would not happen. And you wonder why I am posting negative things about PN. Maybe I would not have to if, like I said in my OP, you spent more time and money looking after the customer, rather than charity events that are just used as free advertising for you. Over all this has been a very negative experience. It would be bad if this was a one off, but sadly, PN have not once lived upto my expectations, this is just the last straw and I will be leaving as soon as Avanti communications have set up my satellite equipment some time this month. I will also be telling anybody who is thinking of moving to PN just how bad you really are and recomend that they go nowhere near you.

Re: auction for altzeimers

adamwalker — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:33:27 GMT

tony8436,
I must apologise that you seem to have had a bad experience here. I will be picking over the details of how we handled this to see precisely what can be learned for future reference.

Quote
One of the CS I spoke to said I would not be billed for the time I could not access the internet

If that is how we worded this we were wrong I'm afraid. Billing is automated and cannot tell if you've had a loss of service or not. The process is a manual one for crediting you for down time and as such I will also make sure that happens along with a good will gesture which I believe you deserve.

Quote
I will also be telling anybody who is thinking of moving to PN just how bad you really are and recommend that they go nowhere near you.

I'm gutted to read that you feel this strongly about the bad experience you had, this is certainly not what we wanted to happen, I can see that you do have a complaint ticket open at the moment so I will make sure that the relevant team respond to you soon.

Re: auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Wed, 04 May 2011 20:37:23 GMT

Adam,
the answer of how to avoid this is simple. If a problem lasts more than say a week, have one person at PN take charge of it, rather than a different person every day telling me to do the same tests I have done time and time again. This means that the customer will only have to do the test once and an engineer visit can be arranged from there. This will cut the time down dramatically and would make it appear to the customer that something is happening. The other thing you can do as well as this is, if CS say they will call back within 24 hours with an update, make sure they call back. Even if it is to say something along the lines of 'we still haven't got to the bottom of it but we are still trying to sort it out'. Again, this would make the customer feel that they haven't just been forgotten about.

Re: auction for altzeimers

Anonymous — Wed, 04 May 2011 20:54:31 GMT

Very well put, and echoes what has been suggested on this forum time and again for years.
Next you will hear how many new staff have been taken on and are being trained... blah blah blah
You can guarantee that if you are reading these forums in three or five years time, that customers will be suggesting the exact same things.
Sigh !

Re: auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:19:33 GMT

From what I have read on other threads on here, PN has a rapidly growing number of customers, but it seems that they no longer have the staff to cope. Even if they have taken on more staff, is this number in any way proportionate to the number of customers and the number of staff required to deal with them effectively? I know that more staff means more cost, but if the number of customers is growing, this should easily pay for a few more staff without a price increase. PN prides itself on winning awards for customer services, but in order to maintain these awards, they need to follow these simple steps, there is no other way (unless a miracle happens and broadband faults cease to exhist).

Re: auction for altzeimers

pierre_pierre — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:46:01 GMT

Tony I am not sticking up for them, but their cranky faults procedure is that when you have completed certain checks using the "report a faullt" thingy, this sets in progress an auto check which then calls out BT. If you never completed that set of checks, that is why they kept on asking you to do them again.
If you had been a bit more open with the forum what was actually wrong, a lot of people would have held you hand and walked you through the checks - and none of them would have been PN employees

Re: auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:55:40 GMT

I couldn't get onto the forum as my speed was as low as 31Kbps and would have taken forever to load which is why I phoned PN and did the test while on the phone to them. I explained that I had already done them but they just insisted that I do them again and again. I do believe that I would have got a better answer from the forum, but, with those speeds and mistakenly thinking that the people I was speaking to on the phone knew what they were doing, phoning seemed the more logical option at the time, however with hine sight, I wish I had come straight here.

Re: auction for altzeimers

WWWombat — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:26:20 GMT

Almost every business that works well do so by building a good relationship.
For a business like plusnet, where you don't have contact for most of the time, you have to examine the occasions when you *do* have those contacts, and see what you can do to build relationships.
Tell me this - how many people on here get a pretty good feeling for the way Plusnet do things *on the forum here*? How many people they help, dig to the bottom of the story, and get things sorted? I'm hoping that the majority of readers have the same answer as me - PN's DCT are working well, and it comes across. Yes, I know some people won't have that answer, and are here on the forum precisely because the relationship through other means has broken down... Yet the DCT do a good job of trying to sort those cases out too.
Then think about why. And somewhere in there is the fact that the relationships are with individuals, who remembers some history - and helps to build trust and faith (in both directions).
The problem with the phone system and the ticket system is that it is open to being thoroughly impersonal (and that's not just restricted to PlusNet's). It takes more than one call, ticket entry to even start building a relationship - and a system where any Tom, Dick or Harry can take over a conversation is one where a relationship starts again. There is no trust or faith in the other side - and (as others have said) being told to repeat previous actions is a great way to remove any residual relationship that was there.
A ticket system that farms work items out to anyone is merely designed to be efficient (which usually means cost-efficient). A ticket system that farms work items to the same employee each time is one designed to build a relationship.
Of course, no-one can know whether a ticket or call is going to be a "relationship-building" (or -destroying) one at first; it takes a while to determine that. But perhaps tony8436 has the right idea here - if a ticket gets older than a certain age, it should automatically be treated differently. For these tickets, the relationship starts to become more important than mere action - so it becomes ever more important to make calls back on time, to get a single interation if possible, and to be able to get a free & fast flow of information (my personal bugbear is the tickets going to the back of the queue when you add extra information). In general, someone might be willing to wait 30 hours to get their first response to the ticket, but not every time they post an update to a ticket that is already a week old.

Re: auction for altzeimers

adamwalker — Thu, 05 May 2011 08:57:45 GMT

Quote
Adam, the answer of how to avoid this is simple. If a problem lasts more than say a week, have one person at PN take charge of it, rather than a different person every day telling me to do the same tests I have done time and time again

I'm a big advocate of taking ownership of protracted issues and always have been, I agree that being more proactive in our approach to that would be good. The only issue I can see with us doing that on every single fault is that it may not be feasible. With that in mind though agents are already encouraged to take ownership where possible and it is left down to their discretion and the merits of each case, I will do what I can to raise awareness of this.

Re: auction for altzeimers

tony8436 — Thu, 05 May 2011 11:49:03 GMT

Adam,
I understand that it is not feasable to do this with every fault, that is why I suggested older than a week, but you may have a different timescale in mind. However, for the faults that are rectified in a good time, there is no need for this. If I had been kept informed of what was happening, phoned back when I was told I would be and not asked to repeat tests, this issue would have been over a lot quicker and I would probably have a warm feeling about PN. Once I got a speed that I was able to access the internet with, I did notice that the ticket had been updated by CS several times, but with the speeds I was getting during the fault, it became almost impossible to get to the ticket to find the replies.