topic Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet in Plusnet Feedback

How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

angryrichard — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 09:01:46 GMT

After several attempts at getting support from Plusnet, I'm hoping that this will help other customers to get their issues dealt with. Please note that I really don't like the methods that I've had to develop to get support, but Plusnet have such an appalling attitude to their customers that this is what is required and I encourage every Plusnet customer to follow these guidelines in order to affect change.

Don't bother logging in to your Plusnet account as Plusnet do not provide any method to create support tickets.
Go on Chat, if you can find it buried on the support section of the site
If it's actually active, talk to a chat agent. You will need to provide your account name and 2 letters from your password.
Tell the chat agent that you need to raise a complaint ticket and that you know it is possible. State your issue and demand that they create a ticket.
You will eventually receive an email with a link to the support ticket site allowing a portal to manage your support request.
Please note that the chat agent will lie and state that it is impossible to raise a support ticket or correspond by email. In which case, keep insisting and tell them that you need to be transferred to a supervisor and are prepared to raise the issue with the ombudsman.

How to raise a complaint with Plusnet

~~Plusnet have a complaints page but it doesn't allow you to raise a complaint. So don't bother with it.~~ (This is covered by jelv's post.)
Raise a complaint directly through the ombudsman (details below) and outline the issue, making sure to state that Plusnet have made it impossible to raise complaints through their website or email.
You should get a reasonably prompt response from Plusnet.

~~What to expect from Plusnet customer support.~~

~~Support will lie and claim that things are not possible.~~
~~Support will not work with you or attempt to suggest methods, solutions or compromises.~~
~~Support will state and restate facts like an automated service.~~
~~Support will extremely begrudgingly escalate issues if you repeat the request often enough. To save time, it may be useful to copy and paste "THIS MUST BE ESCALATED IMMEDIATELY" until they comply.~~
~~Support will assume you are a total idiot.~~
~~Support will do nothing to help with any request.~~
~~Support will not read any notes fully so expect them to not understand the seriousness of the issue, or to wilfully misinterpret your support request or twist it to point blame at you.~~

How to get any action taken on your support request:

Keep a record of what was said and when. Ensure to get all chat requests emailed to you. Avoid phone conversations unless you are able to record them. Be prepared to send everything to the ombudsman.
State what you need to occur, and don't be afraid to tell support that things MUST happen. ~~The support agents will not listen until you have stated this at least 5 times.~~
Do not expect support to offer any discounts, refunds or actual solutions. If you want these things, state that you need them.
Support won't offer any solutions, be prepared to think of solutions yourself. Support agents will completely ignore these requests but complaints agents may be able to act on your ideas for a resolution.
Question every action that support claim they have taken. If they say they've done something, check that they've done what you actually wanted done. Also note that they will lie and not do what was asked so be prepared to raise this again later and see if requests were actioned. For example, if they say they have changed something, ask them if they have actually changed it or merely put in a request to have something changed.
Don't be afraid to raise points about the company. Plusnet hate their customers and delight in torturing them, so take any opportunity possible to call them out on every lie and remind them frequently of how difficult they have made it to get any support in the first place. Tell them directly that they must provide:

~~Email addresses for support and complaints~~
A link in the user home to the support ticket system
A link to complaints in a prominent place on their complaints page

~~Most importantly, expect to have to write at least three times daily until your issues are resolved. Do not wait for action, repeat your need for action to be taken.~~
Be nice to anyone genuinely helpful. ~~There are a few. Unfortunately, mostly in low level positions where they cannot take any action.~~

~~Observations.~~

~~Plusnet fabricated a conversation between themselves and Openreach to attempt to placate me and lied about action having been taken.~~
~~Plusnet lie about issues being escalated~~
~~Plusnet took absolutely no action at any point during my interaction with them. I took every action myself.~~
~~Plusnet will constantly blame others for problems, especially the customer.~~
~~Plusnet will not help in any circumstance.~~
~~Plusnet will apologise for how you are feeling but never for what they have done. No one at Plusnet will take any responsibility for your issues or any poor support you receive.~~

Outcomes.

We need to put pressure on Plusnet to fix their failings.

Plusnet must provide support for all customers equally
Plusnet must make their ticketing and complaints systems easily accessible.
Plusnet must address the systematic failings of support staff to listen to customers or treat then with dignity
Plusnet must empower their support agents to be able to take necessary actions.

Moderator's note by Adie (Dvorak) redacted factually incorrect information

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

jelv — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 11:11:45 GMT

@angryrichard wrote:

How to raise a complaint with Plusnet

Plusnet have a complaints page but it doesn't allow you to raise a complaint. So don't bother with it.

That's not correct.

On the page https://www.plus.net/help/legal/complaints-code-of-practice/ which tells you about the various ways to raise a complaint there it says:

If you prefer to contact us in writing, you can use the Help Assistant to raise a ticket (you'll need your account username and password). A member of our team will investigate and respond to your complaint within 5 working days.

The link in that paragraph takes you to the page where you can raise a complaint ticket.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

angryrichard — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 17:04:53 GMT

More lies.

Please don't add to this with LIES, it's here to HELP Plusnet customers, not LIE to them more!

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

BrightonRock — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 17:10:11 GMT

Link to raising a ticket on the complaint page works for me

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

Mustrum — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 17:11:46 GMT

It works for me too, and can be accessed from the bottom of every forum page, so not sure why it needs a guide.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

angryrichard — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 17:13:51 GMT

It needs a guide because Plusnet IGNORE their customers, LIE to them, and provide NO HELP.

If you READ the guide, you'll see that there is advice for how to ACTUALLY GET RESULTS

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

Browni — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 17:29:42 GMT

Last time I had a problem I simply went to faults.plus.net (such an easy URI to remember :)) and created a ticket which was worked on and fixed the next working day.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

jelv — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 18:31:45 GMT

@angryrichard wrote:

More lies.

Please don't add to this with LIES, it's here to HELP Plusnet customers, not LIE to them more!

With one post you've totally destroyed any remaining credibility your original post had.

Your choice of user name had already done it great damage as people seeing the topic listed may well have decided it was the rantings of a hothead without even opening it!

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

angryrichard — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 18:48:03 GMT

Jelv, I posted this after a drawn out and really horrible battle with Plusnet to get any resolution to an issue. I spent hours trying to get help and was ignored and found everyone I felt with useless.

Your experience may be different, but please do not belittle another user. I posted this as o have been left extremely upset and hurt and frustrated by the experience and I wanted others to get an insight into the suffering that I was subjected to and to help those in the same boat as me. You are obviously not in that boat. Please don't mock people or say hurtful things to them when you are not affected and they are not harming you but merely expressing their pain and sharing their experience.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

Mav — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 19:45:51 GMT

Moderator's note:

Unhelpful post removed.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

JonoH — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 14:59:28 GMT

Hi @angryrichard

There obviously a lot of hostility in your post, lots of the content is clearly untrue. That being said I still want to help as clearly we've let you down somewhere and for that I'm really sorry. If you can PM me your account details I'd love to take a look into it for you.

There is one statement that I would like to highlight though and it's this

angryrichard wrote:
Raise a complaint directly through the ombudsman (details below) and outline the issue, making sure to state that Plusnet have made it impossible to raise complaints through their website or email.

If any customer wants to complains to Ombudsman Services, obviously they can that's why we use their services. It is however important to note that the advice here will lead to a worse customer experience as Ombudsman Services will respond to you telling you to raise your initial complaint to Plusnet and will not intervene on your behalf until we've been given chance to rectify the issue. If as suggested here your first complaint is raised to the Ombudsman then that will delay resolution of your issue.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

Strat — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 11:10:36 GMT

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

pureedfruit — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 09:44:01 GMT

Adie

You may feel that AngryRichard's post is "factually incorrect" but when you are on the receiving end of poor service from PN CS, and he is clearly not the only one - just look of the huge number of different posts that are saying much the same thing one way or another - that's very much the way you feel, and it becomes your reality (= factually correct from your perspective). I have expressed it slightly differently in another post "It seems to me that PN CS is now more focused on "How quickly can I get this customer off my back ?" rather than "How can I best solve this customers's problem ?"

Adie, I don't think we can all be wrong. Moreover you only have to look at the way PN is responding to this fairly widespread criticism of CS: there are no signs that it is trying to improve CS, no statistics to show that CS is improving, only attempts to make it more and more difficult to raise an issue - witness the recent burying of the ticket system.

As I have remarked before PN seems to have no concept of what "Well do you proud" actually means. It is now no more than a meaningless, marketing catch phrase.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

Strat — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 11:10:37 GMT

@pureedfruit wrote:
Adie, I don't think we can all be wrong.

Equally all those many thousands of customers who are satisfied and don't post on here to express their satisfaction can't be wrong.

I would be happy to place a large bet that they are in the majority.

This is not to detract from the very real problems that some customers do have and need attending to in a timely manner.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

pureedfruit — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 13:16:45 GMT

Strat

And you will know equally well that there are many unhappy customers that can't be bothered, or find the time to post, either, even when they are unhappy.

But that is not the point. There simply should not be so many unhappy PN customers.

3 years ago when I was last with PN my recollection is that there was nowhere near this volume of complaints.

And what is particularly telling is that I can see no evidence of PN actually trying to improve the situation, merely trying to reduce the ways in which you can complain.

I left VM to return to PN because VM got taken over my a huge American organisation which was hell bent on ploughing all its money into trying to expand the network hugely, neglecting the established network, and correspondingly cutting back on CS.

What's PN's excuse for deteriorating CS ?

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

Strat — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 14:55:15 GMT

@pureedfruit wrote:.
What's PN's excuse for deteriorating CS ?

My personal theory is that the customer base has grown faster than was anticipated and support staff numbers are having to be increased in proportion.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

HarryB — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 15:29:21 GMT

Hi @pureedfruit

I'm sorry to hear you feel we're cutting back on CS in order to instead put that cost in to expanding the network. I can assure you this is not the case and we are in fact still hiring more staff, as per the careers page Strat has linked to in his latest post.

In regards to deteriorating CS, I'm not sure this is the case to be honest. While you may see an increase of customers complaining here, and it may very well be correct that there is a higher number of people complaining about various things, this doesn't necessarily translate in to a higher percentage of our customer base complaining given how much our customer base has grown over the past 5 years and as Strat has stated, there will be many customers that are extremely happy with the service or even have a better experience than they expected. But those people don't tend to run to various social media platforms/forums/review sites to make that known, someone is much more likely to complain following a bad experience than a good experience, understandably.

Reducing the ticket system a fair few years ago was not a move to reduce ways in which someone can complain (The complaint channel is still very much there and detailed on our complaints code of practice on how to raise a complaint ticket via the help assistant/ticket system)

I believe the ticket system was reduced as many people expected this to be more of an instant response support channel, which the added channel (Around the same time the ticket system was reduced) of a live chat system would be more suited to.

Is there something service specific that you're unhappy with that we may be able to help you with? While I won't be able to bring back the ticket system that was reduced a few years back, we're more than happy to help with the queries you would have previously asked via the ticket system.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

pureedfruit — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 17:04:13 GMT

Harry

I didn't say or suggest that "feel we're cutting back on CS in order to instead put that cost in to expanding the network" merely commented that was what had happened at VM.

Re " there will be many customers that are extremely happy with the service or even have a better experience than they expected", and so there should be. That was the promise - "we'll do you proud".But "many" is not enough, it should be all.

You wish to argue, as does Strat, that the increase in complaints is due to an increase in customers, that it may be an increase in absolute terms, but not in percentage terms. Frankly that would carry a lot more conviction if PN published statistics to support that claim. I suspect that the very reason it does not is that it would all to easily become a stick to beat PN with.

However you look at it, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that PN is not on top of the problem. Strat points to the fact that PN is now recruiting more CS staff to cope with the extra customers, thus evidencing my point. It follows like night follows day, that if you do promotions to recruit more customers that you will rapidly need extra CS staff. They should have been recruited in parallel. It is unfair both on customers, and on existing CS, staff not to do that.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

JonoH — Sun, 12 Aug 2018 08:46:05 GMT

@pureedfruit wrote:

Re " there will be many customers that are extremely happy with the service or even have a better experience than they expected", and so there should be. That was the promise - "we'll do you proud".But "many" is not enough, it should be all.

Whilst absolutely nobody is suggesting that we're there yet, service levels are improving. I'd love us to be in a position where all of our customers where happy and I'll entertain any reasonable idea to help us get there, but as far as I know there isn't a large business in the world where every single customer of theirs is happy. People become unhappy for all sorts of reason, often out of our control.

We often get complaints about the speed of peoples broadband for example, and unless there is a fault on the line we're powerless to fix it.

The speed you can achieve is not limited as per our Unlimited Broadband adverts but it is subject to the laws of physics and as such the speed is determined by factors such as (and this list isn't exhaustive)

Length of line
Distance to the exchange
Quality of the line
Quality of the customers internal wiring
Access technology availble in your area.

These are all things that because of how the UK broadband market works, we have no control over, and yet customers are (often rightly) disappointed about.

You wish to argue, as does Strat, that the increase in complaints is due to an increase in customers, that it may be an increase in absolute terms, but not in percentage terms.

Frankly that would carry a lot more conviction if PN published statistics to support that claim. I suspect that the very reason it does not is that it would all to easily become a stick to beat PN with.

Lucky those numbers are available here, we were joint second worst for complaints as a percentage of customers. Thats really not a good place to be.

Our most common complaint cause is wait times, as such that's where we're focusing our resources. You may have seen the job vacancies posted on our careers page but in case you didn't we're looking to significantly increase our support staff.

As we point out here our average wait time across all departments was 343 seconds, almost 6 minutes. That's not good enough,the last quarter we got it down to 317 seconds, a little over 5 minutes. It's still not good enough but it is coming down and we expect it to be a slow journey as we take on, and train new staff. Even when they're trained and on the phones it will take a while for them to be as efficient as our more tenured staff.

One months data could be a fluke or statistical anomaly so lets look at the last year.

July-Sept 2017 703 seconds
Oct-Dec 2017 608 seconds
Jan-Mar 2018 343 seconds
Apr-Jun 2019 317 seconds

However you look at it, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that PN is not on top of the problem. Strat points to the fact that PN is now recruiting more CS staff to cope with the extra customers, thus evidencing my point. It follows like night follows day, that if you do promotions to recruit more customers that you will rapidly need extra CS staff. They should have been recruited in parallel. It is unfair both on customers, and on existing CS, staff not to do that.

You'll find absolutely no argument from me there, whilst we have been recruiting constantly we've obviously incorrectly foretasted demand.

We do though have a very difficult balancing act when it comes to staff numbers. Frankly we're a value provider, that doesn't mean we're the cheapest but it does mean that we have to offer competitive pricing whilst maintaining quality service, we've taken the decision to answer 100% of our calls in the UK and that's obviously a little pricier than some of the options our competitors have chosen but the feedback we do keep getting is that whilst there are not enough of them, the service they provide is the best in the industry and we're very proud of them.

If we recruit too many staff prices will obviously have to rise to pay for them and so we need enough staff but not too many, we obviously got that wrong.

Re: How to raise a support ticket with Plusnet

pureedfruit — Sun, 12 Aug 2018 14:28:52 GMT

Jono H

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

The OFGEM statistics you link to are very interesting. I think most of the time PN do better than joint second, by beating BT most of the time. However that leads on to a very interesting question, namely that "Given that everyone in that comparison, apart from Virgin Media (VM), is running on the same broadband network created and managed by BT, how come there is such a wide disparity in the complaints per 1000 customers ? Specifically why is Sky so good and BT so bad (4x as many complaints as Sky) ? It simply does not make sense. I begin to wonder whether Sky has found some clever way of massaging the figures.

Another interesting question is how did EE get from second to bottom (34/1000) in Q 1 2016 to second from top (12/1000) by Q4 2017. And if EE can do it, why can't PN ? And last but not least, where are the figures for 2018 ?

I also looked at the recruitment ads that you and Strat have pointed me to. The thing that struck me most is that a "Customer Solutions Adviser" , presumably the people we are talking about, can earn up to 14% on top of their basic salary from OTE. So what targets would they be? My guess is dealing with more customers than average i.e. dealing with them more quickly, thus leading credence to my belief that PN CS staff seem to be more concerned to "get you off their back" rather than sending the customer away happy.

I take your points about all the things that can theoretically reduce ones broadband speed which are outside PNs control. like

Length of line
Distance to the exchange
Quality of the line
Quality of the customers internal wiring
Access technology available in your area

BUT they don't change between when PN/BT make their initial test of the line and as a result state a minimum guaranteed speed. Strat suggests that the only guarantee that is being made is of the speed delivered into the modem, not the speed out of the User side. Apart from being totally disingenuous on PNs part to state that without any caveat at the time of offering the guarantee, I frankly do not believe that your modem then looses between 7 & 13% of that speed. Certainly if I unplug the link in to by Devolo network, which I prefer to using Wi-Fi, it makes no difference.

Anyway good luck with your recruitment and improving PN CS service level. I for my part shall continue to try hard not to make use of PN CS just as long as my broadband continues to function at its present level, albeit somewhat less than that "guaranteed"