Extremely frustrating experience

[#1]

I now have another engineer booked to come next Monday. That will be more than 3 weeks after the previous engineer, even though it was totally clear straight away that the problem had not been solved. Plusnet confirmed this on 29th September, the Monday after his visit.
As far as I understand no-one has actually done anything to try and fix the line in that time. Or at least, after numerous requests from myself for information, no-one has told me anything. Great, so I get a 3 week wait between actions because.... what? Bureaucratic red tape. It's ridiculous.
BT wholesale have no incentive to provide me with a good service - they just want to avoid spending money by calling out Openreach, so they delay everything as much as possible. Plusnet seem to make absolutely no attempt whatsoever to hold BT to account, and just shrug their shoulders. So I, as end customer, seem to have no power at all in this situation. To anyone reading this, I would recommend that you get Cable internet if it is available. At least then you would probably have just 1 company to deal with, and you won't get fobbed off the whole time.

[#2]

My BT engineer visit was booked for this morning between 8am and 1pm. I had to reschedule my week in order to be in to make that appointment. No one has turned up.

[#3]

Hi thesheep,
I'm looking into this now for you. I can see you've phoned in but will get this chased and find out what's going on for you.
Once again, I'm sorry for all the hassle.

[#4]

It's now been an hour since I phoned Plusnet to report that the engineer didn't turn up. Plusnet promised to call me but I've heard nothing.
It is discourteous to not even let me know what is going on. I have travelled back from Birmingham especially for this appointment and waited in since 8am. I am still waiting in on the vain hope that an engineer may turn up this afternoon. Who knows? No-one can even be bothered to call me.

[#5]

Right, we've had a chat to BTW who have contacted Openreach, and here's what's going on.
Basically they needed to get in contact with the previous engineer to find out some more detail on the case. On doing so they found that the issue is being caused by faulty tie pairs at the exchange.
As a result of this they have raised a job to send an engineer to the exchange and resolve the issue rather than to send another engineer out to your premises, and this should be completed within 48 hours.
I'm sorry there wasn't any contact either from us or from BT about this and that it led to all that wasted time and a rearranged week. I'll keep an eye on the fault and let you know when we hear anything further.

[#6]

Matt - BT now say they've changed the tie pairs at the exchange and hopefully the problem should be fixed.
I've had a message from Plusnet to say that I would need to confirm the fault is not fixed within 5 days or the case will be automatically closed.
Unfortunately I have to go away this weekend until Tuesday night, so won't be around to test it over the weekend.
The dropping appears to have stopped at the moment, but this is an intermittent fault and we had that behaviour several times before, only to see it return some days later.
At the moment my broadband speed is still less than 100k (see BT speedtest results screenshot attached), so obviously the test will be whether the IP profile can reset itself, and stay up where it should be (5 Meg, 6 Meg, or whatever it manages to get).
Please ensure that BT absolutely do not close the case before we have confirmed that the connection is back up to where it should be, and can sustain it.
It is a bit of a nonsense for you to say that it will take up to 5 days for the IP profile to reset, but also tell me that I must confirm the fault is fixed within 5 days... clearly in this case we need a bit longer than 5 days to confirm that it's really fixed. Hopefully you can see that.

[#7]

The connection still seems to be dropping. I've just had 3 drops in the last 10 minutes: one at 08:42, then at 08:49 and another at 08:50. I'm on my way to work now, but this seems enough to suggest that changing the tie pairs was not the solution.

[#8]

Right, the case won't be closed yet so I'll pass it back to BT for you, but will also have a word with the faults team as I've a feeling this will need escalating now. I'll let you know what happens.
Sorry for the continued hassle,
Matt

[#9]

Hi Matt
Did you manage to get this escalated?
I had a call today from someone at Plusnet (who left a message) saying that you want to test my hardware here again, because the upload direction is showing faults and you think that suggests an end user hardware problem. So presumably you want to send me another test router, etc, etc
Forgive me for thinking that this is BT stalling again, and not wanting to do anything that costs them money. Not only have I tested the connection previously with a test router that you sent me (which has been returned) but the BT Openreach Engineer who came here was also able to duplicate the fault using his own hardware from my house. So that is 3 different, independent sets of hardware we have already used. Why do you want to test that again? It doesn't really make sense to me.
Could you do something or push someone to help here please?
Also, as a very minor point, I'd also appreciate it if members of the Plusnet team could call me on my mobile, as I'm often not at home. I have requested this on the support ticket, but they seem to keep calling my landline, and leaving a message. It then requires me to call them back, which almost always requires waiting in a queue for 15 or 20 minutes before the call is answered. I know it's a small point, but it would help a bit.

[#10]

This is a disgrace. Somebody somewhere should have taken this problem and made it a priority ticket where nobody does ANYTHING without reading the full history.
Here's a suggestion. Allocate one member of staff to this ticket and make him/her responsible for checking progress at least once a day and for keeping the customer updated properly.

[#11]

On a video interview many many months ago the CSC manager agreed that the problem of different csc agents picking up a ticket and not reading all the history was a serious issue that was being addressed.
I would have thought if a PN customer was suffering a serious issue like this - it should be assigned to ONE experinced agent who then owns the problem and sees it through to resolution.
I understand that this may give problems if that agent is then on hoilday etc etc, but PN's csc is not that large that managers can't cope with this ?.

[#12]

I'm sorry that this has dragged on for so long.
I have raised this again with the faults team manager to investigate and escalate within management at BT Wholesale.
I agree that its taking a long time to resolve and that from where I'm sat we dont appear to be pushing BT hard enough.
I'll await Simon's input though as he is better placed to advise on the state of play.
Mark

[#13]

Quote from: thesheep

Forgive me for thinking that this is BT stalling again, and not wanting to do anything that costs them money. Not only have I tested the connection previously with a test router that you sent me (which has been returned) but the BT Openreach Engineer who came here was also able to duplicate the fault using his own hardware from my house. So that is 3 different, independent sets of hardware we have already used. Why do you want to test that again? It doesn't really make sense to me.

Neither me. I've added some comments to your fault ticket and have just spoken to the Support Centre to see if we can get a faults analyst onto this tonight. Those scheduled to work the faults workflows have gone home know but I've been promised that we'll get somebody onto your ticket later on this evening if things quieten down. Failing that, I'll chase this up in the morning.

Quote

Also, as a very minor point, I'd also appreciate it if members of the Plusnet team could call me on my mobile, as I'm often not at home.

I've made note to this affect on your account.

[#14]

It's good to read these comments promising action. However, I have had such comments before on this very thread, and nothing really happened - hopefully this time you guys can really get something moving!

Quote

On a video interview many many months ago the CSC manager agreed that the problem of different csc agents picking up a ticket and not reading all the history was a serious issue that was being addressed.

I suspect that one contributing factor in this case could be a confirmed fault with the Plusnet support ticket system which means I'm still unable to leave replies/comments to my own support tickets. This results in multiple tickets for the same issue.

[#15]

Quote from: thesheep

It's good to read these comments promising action. However, I have had such comments before on this very thread, and nothing really happened - hopefully this time you guys can really get something moving!

A little bird came over to my desk earlier suggesting that things were definitely looking better. Did somebody manage to get in touch with you and what's the latest?