topic Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon in Plusnet Feedback

Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

michaeldendulk — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 17:22:49 GMT

Doing you proud, what a laugh.
We are moving home, originally at the end of this month, but due to delays in the process, this has now turned into next month. We had originally arranged to move our services to our new home today, but informed home moves of the change in date and got this confirmed via email and ticket.
Just after 5PM today, all our services went dead. After waiting on hold for 30 minutes on my mobile phone, I find out that you have moved our activation at our new address to the end of next month, but somebody has forgotten to move the deactivation at our current address, so everything has been terminated. As it is Friday, we are not getting our phone line back till Monday and our internet has to be reordered, which can't be started till we get our phone back on Monday, so heaven knows when we will have that back.
After being without internet for 4 days last month, also because of an error on your side of things, this is our limit. We will be cancelling all our services with you and moving elsewhere and you can expect a hearty complaints letter.
Some of the worst customer service I've ever received and one hell of a joke to boot.
Good luck with your customers, we won't be among them much longer.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

LinnPlusnet — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 10:37:23 GMT

Hi michaeldendulk,
I'm very sorry to hear of the issues you've experiencing regarding your house move.
I've had a look into this and can see that the re-provide of your services was initiated on Friday the 25/04/2014 and your phone order has now completed so you should be able to your phone service in your current property. We will be placing your Fibre order in the next 24 hours once the systems update to reflect Fibre as available on your line (after a line is re-started it can take up to 24 hours for the systems to update to show that we can go ahead with a Fibre order). As you previously had the Fibre service installed you should not require an engineers visit to the property as the engineer should only have to complete external work without visiting the property. We can only do this if you have kept the BT OpenReach modem, can you confirm that you have this? If you don't then we would have to book an engineer to attend the property which means that someone will need to be in the property to allow the engineer access for this.
I can only apologise that the agent that you spoke to to delay the orders for your new property did not delay the order to cease your services in your current property as well. I completely understand that you wish to cancel your services all together and I can confirm that we've received your complaint on Ticket: 84776971
Please confirm if you've still got the BT OpenReach modem on either this thread or on Ticket: 84774070 and we can arrange for the appropriate order to be placed.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

michaeldendulk — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:11:44 GMT

I can confirm we DO still have all the BT equipment in place, but as I type this our phone line IS NOT working correctly yet, we can call out, but incoming calls are not getting through.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

Townman — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:16:38 GMT

What do you get?
Ringing tone but no ring?
No tone, just silence?
Unobtainable tone?
Or something else?

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

michaeldendulk — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:31:50 GMT

Other, like the engaged tone, but then longer 'beeps' with a higher tone with the length of the beep and the silence between the next beep being the same. Gives 3 of these beeps and then goes completely silent. Both handsets are ready to receive calls, they are not off the hook and as we can call out, I would assume that means there are no problems with the wires etc.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

Townman — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 15:49:23 GMT

Michael,
Possibly a dumb question - has call divert been setup on the line?

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

HPsauce — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 15:56:46 GMT

Have you tried calling the test number 17070 to verify the number?

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

michaeldendulk — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 16:06:48 GMT

Seems HP has hit the nail on the head, they have changed our phone number, brilliant, just brilliant. Only told them on the phone we didn't want to keep the phone number WHEN WE MOVED, as we are moving away from BT to Virgin.
So nice when people don't bother to listen to what they're being told...
Better start making sure everybody has our mobile numbers...

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

HPsauce — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 16:19:42 GMT

Could be miswired, you need to check what number has been allocated according to PlusNet.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

LinnPlusnet — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 16:25:54 GMT

Hi michaeldendulk,
I've just had a further look into this and yes, it seems the agent you spoke to on Friday didn't re-start your phone line with your old number and allocated a new number instead. This is because your old number was still being processed on the order for your house move. Now that the order is cancelled I have requested that we renumber your line back to your old number. This should complete in the next 24 hours and once it's complete we'll place your Fibre order. I'm very sorry for the issues caused by this.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

Townman — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 16:54:03 GMT

Linn,
Clearly the priority is to get the user back on air again, however I suggest there needs to be a process drains-up on this one in order to limit the possibility of it happening again. Granted it is an odd-ball situation, but a few balls have been dropped here.
1. Customer requested deferral of the house move date - target services got deferred but current service termination did not - why?
2. In seeking to sort matters out, re-instatement sort to provision a new line rather than deal with (reverse out) the cessation of the old line - why and why was the user not informed of the challenges / alternative course of action taken?

Findings should be input into the new provisioning system design. I would have expected intrinsic links between existing service and new service planning / management. Sure under the covers there might be separate activities, but within the CMS they should have been joined up to ensure continuity of service.

Cheers,
Kevin

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

LinnPlusnet — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 08:14:50 GMT

HI Kevin,
I agree that the priority is to get the OP back online.
I'll quote your questions and my answers will be below:

Quote
1. Customer requested deferral of the house move date - target services got deferred but current service termination did not - why?

The new Provisioning system should stop things like this from happening in the future, however, in this particular instance it was down to human error as the advisor that the OP spoke to made a mistake and didn't change the date on the cease order. This is manually changed on the order and unfortunately they didn't change the cease date when they changed the provide date for the new property. This has been fed back internally to ensure this advisor doesn't make the same mistake in the future.

Quote
2. In seeking to sort matters out, re-instatement sort to provision a new line rather than deal with (reverse out) the cessation of the old line - why and why was the user not informed of the challenges / alternative course of action taken?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this? When the OP called up on the 25th the advisor they spoke to placed the order to re-activate the stopped line at their current property and this takes 24 working hours to complete. As the 25th was a Friday this didn't complete until Monday the 28th. Unfortunately the number that was assigned to the line was not the OP's previous number so I placed the order to re-number the line back to their old number. Re-activating the stopped line was the fastest way to get the OP's phone service activated. If we would've opted for a new line to be installed this would've delayed the service becoming active as it would depend on engineer availability.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

Townman — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 08:32:16 GMT

Linn,
Thank you for taking the time to give a comprehensive reply - which was more than I expected - "lessons have been learnt and the new provisioning system will prevent this happening" would have been enough. Given the detailed response, I note...
1. If one agent can make this mistake, any agent could make this mistake, so feed back should go to all agents - when going X please do not forget to do Y at the same time
2. May be it is semantics, but surely the process which "re-activates the stopped line" should by default use the same number? If not then is there is an additional activity to be performed which got missed? Getting a new number seems like the consequence of a "new provision" rather than a "re-activate" process. I suspect that dealing with BTOR's back end systems is akin to putting your hand in a nest of vipers at times?
It is really good to learn that the new provisioning system will have logic interlocks which will prevent this process issue happening again.
Cheers,
Kevin

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

LinnPlusnet — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 08:54:02 GMT

I shall do the same with your response:

Quote
1. If one agent can make this mistake, any agent could make this mistake, so feed back should go to all agents - when going X please do not forget to do Y at the same time

The feedback process is there to feedback on specific advisors when they've not followed protocol/processes correctly. In this instance the advisor made a mistake which resulted in a negative outcome hence why we've fed back on this. Everyone is aware what the correct process is, it just so happens that in this instance the advisor forgot. I'm sure we can all appreciate that sometimes mistakes happen and we can all be a bit forgetful at times, I am in no way excusing what the advisor did, I am merely stating that in this instance there wouldn't be a necessity to feedback on all agents.

Quote
2. May be it is semantics, but surely the process which "re-activates the stopped line" should by default use the same number? If not then is there is an additional activity to be performed which got missed? Getting a new number seems like the consequence of a "new provision" rather than a "re-activate" process. I suspect that dealing with BTOR's back end systems is akin to putting your hand in a nest of vipers at times?

As I stated in my original post to the OP regarding the re-number -

Quote
the agent you spoke to on Friday didn't re-start your phone line with your old number and allocated a new number instead. This is because your old number was still being processed on the order for your house move.

Basically, their old number was allocated to the new provision order for their new property and the order was still open at the time that the advisor placed the order to re-activate the line at their current property so they had no option but to re-start the line with a random number.
Once the new Provisioning system is in place it should eradicate many of the issues we're seeing at the moment.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

Empirical — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 11:08:33 GMT

If the customer was going to have a new number temporarily they should be informed of that, it doesnt look like they were.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

LinnPlusnet — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 12:10:15 GMT

I can appreciate this, Empirical. I can't confirm or deny if the advisor they spoke to on Friday did mention this or not but it is clearly stated on the ticket. Nevertheless, the order to renumber their line back to their old number has now completed.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

michaeldendulk — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 20:22:08 GMT

The adviser simply told me last Friday he would have the line reconnected, there was no mention of the phone number changing. This was only mentioned when I told the adviser that we would be moving away from Plusnet next month, at which point I was asked if I was keeping the number and I said no, as we are moving to Virgin.
We are now getting our broadband back, wait for it, Wednesday the 7th of May. Apparently we have to wait for an engineer visit, heaven knows why and seeing as this whole situation is a blunder on behalf of Plusnet, I'd at least expect it to be fast tracked, which it isn't. We are in luck that a few of our neighbors have BT at home, so we can hook up to BT fon WIFI at £6 per day, nicely putting us out of pocket, and then only one of us could be online at the same time, both my wife and myself tend to use the internet simultaneously, so that would turn into £12 a day. I've been using my mobile phone as a hotspot so far, but my data is not going to last that much longer.
This really is a total shambles, 13 days without our broadband connection due to an error by one of your staff. I'd almost tell you not to bother to reconnect us, if we didn't want our internet back so badly. We're at the tail end of a house purchase and I have emails flying around left right and center I really need to access and reply to in order to get all the loose ends tied up and having to do it all relying on my mobile phone isn't really helping much. As far as I am concerned, this is breach of contract and I shall be updating the complaint I logged accordingly.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

LinnPlusnet — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 08:55:09 GMT

Hi michaeldendulk,
I'm sorry if the advisor you spoke to didn't explain this to you regarding your number. As I've confirmed previously, you should now have your old number back.
The engineer's visit is required as it's for Fibre and an engineer is required to attend your Local Exchange and cabinet to connect your services. This is manual work that is required, hence why we rely on engineer availability and this was booked in for the earliest availability in your area.
I'm very sorry for the inconvenience caused by all of this and I can understand that it is a stressful time.

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

jelv — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 11:19:57 GMT

Would a plain ADSL connection have been quicker and met michaeldendulk's requirement to do all the emails needed to complete the formalities?

Re: Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

Townman — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 11:20:15 GMT

Linn,
In this day and age, do they REALLY go and physically disconnect these services, rather than just electronically turn them off? I would expect not!
Given that this all arose out of a PlusNet mistake, is there no "special provisions" route within / through BTw which could have been used to get things put back quicker than they have been?
Things can and do go wrong due to errors (we are all human), in such circumstances there ought to be remedial escalation routes to put things back as they should be much quicker than "business as usual" routes permit.

Kevin