Technical support disaster
unfortunately our Technical Support Team are not able to guarantee support with 3rd party settings.
I agree with this - of course they cannot support 3rd party products.
But he should not have assumed before doing something drastic like resetting the router to factory defaults
| he requested a factory reset without having made any attempt whatsoever to understand the consequences and whether he could fix it
Chances are this is on the script they use? IDK. I've never known a plusnet agent support a 3rd party router. BT on the other hand have ruined many of mine and my friends connections and one of my personal computers!!
If it was a standard script then that is FAR worse than a single incompetent technician - because it means that you provide all technicians with incompetent scripts and expect all technicians to be incompetent and follow the scripts blindly.
| This is not my fault or the customers - it is wholly the fault of the support technician.
It could well be the techs fault. I guess the order on which things happened will give an answer to all of this
It cannot be anyone else's fault but PlusNets. You cannot blame a customer for being non-technical and not knowing that they had to tell the technician something.
| Plusnet would have known this if they had asked the customer - but they didn't
Quite possibly churn rate. Take a call, fix (or not in this case), end call, take next call. They may have targets to meet? He may have assumed, prior to the reset, it was a standard router with the standard setup, not ageist here, but could have thought your friend, being old, was not likely to have the technical know-how to adjust the default settings. This should be answered in the recordings I would expect.
If he had asked, and then performed a factory reset knowing the router was non-standard that would actually be worse than simply assuming it was, wouldn't it?
| They could have asked if the customer had the router admin password so they could save the configuration.
I guess they could, but should they?
Not in normal circumstances, but if they are thinking of doing a factory reset then they should try to understand what options were available that might avoid something as drastic as this.
| No - the onus is on the technical support technician to know what he is doing
They should only know about their products and services and their supplied routers. As I said, only had issues with BT technical support. I don't often call Plusnet either, as I 'do it' via these forums.
I did not say that the technician should know about 3rd party products, I said he should know what he was doing - and someone who resets a router to factory defaults without knowing they can set it up again clearly doesn't know what he is doing. The point is not that he should have known about all 3rd party products, but that he should have known NOT to reset a 3rd party product to factory defaults.
| it is not the responsibility of the customer to volunteer the router model
I have to disagree, yes it is. Tech support would only know of the last router they sent to the customer. They cannot 'see' if the router has been changed, though some 'back office' guys can see it wouldn't be a plusnet issued router, but only when they try to 'talk' to it. If your friend made them aware before the reset, then the guy got this very very wrong.
You cannot expect a non-technical user to know what they have to volunteer - the onus is on the technician to ask. When they ask, the onus is then on the user to be honest and tell them what router it is. If they lie and say it is a Plusnet router when it is a BT Smarthub, then they have only themselves to blame. But if the technician doesn't ask, or they ask and still go ahead with resetting a 3rd party product, it cannot be the customers fault.
| How would a non-technical customer know that was needed? As I said before, let's not transfer the blame from the supplier where it belongs to the customer who is the innocent party.
I get that, but what if plusnet weren't aware it wasn't the last router they sent out? Which he only found out after the reset? The relevant questions should have been asked.
Exactly.
| No - you missed the point. This is not "tinkering" on a non-Plusnet router. Connecting to Wifi requires no tinkering whatsoever with the router.
Let's agree in part. A standard issue router, left in default settings, does not need any 'tinkering'. But your friend has a 3rd party router, that you 'tinkered' with to get it set onto the plusnet network, you then 'tinkered' with the settings to change the defaults too, or did I misread this?
Equally this is nothing to do with what router model you have
I'm missing something here. They do not support 3rd party routers and it's down to the end user to use a 3rd party router. There's too many routers out there for anyone to be trained to use (and even remember all of those too). Knowing exactly what happened in the correct order will reveal all.
Yes - you misread this. The router had been configured, but once the technician had reset it to factory defaults then (by definition) it had no longer been "tinkered with". At that point there was no excuse why he could not have got my friend connected to wifi. Either he didn't even try (which is appalling) or he tried but didn't know how to achieve it (equally appalling).
Equally this is nothing to do with what router model you have
I'm missing something here. They do not support 3rd party routers and it's down to the end user to use a 3rd party router. There's too many routers out there for anyone to be trained to use (and even remember all of those too). Knowing exactly what happened in the correct order will reveal all.
Exactly. They don't support 3rd party routers, so they shouldn't be resetting them to factory defaults. Once they did something that stupid, then they needed to make an exception and do their best to fix the mess they had created.
But, if you set it up, why did it go wrong? Plusnet didn't set up the 3rd party router. They are only trained in their own gear.
It went wrong because there was some sort of glitch. No one had made changes to the router since it was set up. There was no damage to wiring in the house. Nothing had changed at the customer's end. If I was on site I might be able to look at the details and see - especially if the router logs were still in tact - but of course it was reset to factory defaults, so the logs will have been deleted.
Perhaps if he had power cycled the router after having checked the line with OpenReach it might have come straight back up. But he didn't - he reset to factory defaults, told her to turn it off for 15 minutes, saying it would all work when she powered it back on, and then rang off and closed the ticket. That was never going to work - the router was unconfigured and was not going to configure itself. her laptop and printer were not connected on Wifi either. Technician didn't bother to check it was working.
| If it was a PlusNet supplied router, making the wifi connection for the customer would have been exactly the same instructions.
But if you changed the settings, which you did, then it's not. It was not in it's default configuration.
Which bit about factory reset don't you understand?
If it is a non-default SSID AND they don't know the password AND there is no WPS button, then PlusNet could not have helped.
Exactly, it was not default. There is a WPS button on most routers, although I always turn it off (none of my routers, from any ISP are left in their default settings, so I'm responsible for any issues I create). Getting me to reset to defaults would revert it to the standard SSID, standard password, standard WPS functionality. It would, if it was an ISP supplied router, then reconnect to their network in it's factory configured settings. But again,if the call recording proves the tech guy got it wrong, then plusnet should 'fess up'. With a suitable apology for the stress and hassle.
No - after factory reset it WAS default. And as I said, either he didn't try to get her wifi reconnected, or was incapable of doing it with a router whose wifi SSID and password were printed on the back of the router.
| Can we please stop trying to make excuses for the inexcusable.
I'm not excusing what may or may not have happened.If the guy got it wrong then plusnet should make amends.
Which bit of resetting a router you cannot support to factory defaults and then walking away and closing the ticket with router unconfigured and laptop and printer disconnected from wifi could possibly be interpreted as NOT being in the wrong?
But AFAIK the technician didn't know what make of router it was
And here's where this all could have been avoided. If he didn't know, prior to the reset, how was he to know what the consequences would be? If the recording shows he was told (he would have no reason to ask if the user was not using a plusnet supplied router) that it was a BTH6,he should have stopped at that point.
It is HIS job as the expert to know what he is doing and what the consequences are. It cannot be the job of a non-technical customer. Period! He either didn't ask (which was stupid) or he asked and went ahead anyway (which was even more stupid). Except for if the customer lied about the router model (which I am 99.999999999999999% sure she would never have done), just exactly how could it NOT be the technicians fault?
| reset router, made other changes to help. using BT router. advised to switch off, will call back in 30 mins.
Well, there we go then
. It looks like he knew and he was wrong, but what I don't know was whether this was said to him at the beginning before the reset, or after the reset. If he didn't know before then is does sound like human error,if he knew at the beginning then he was indeed very much in the wrong.
Yes - hadn't joined that one up. See above for reasons why technician is in the wrong on all possibilities.
| He literally closed the ticket and walked away.
He was wrong to do that too!
As I said, I'm not defending anyone.
Aren't you? As far as I can see there are no possible circumstances (assuming we rule out the customer lying) under which the technician could possibly have a defence. They shouldn't have reset a router without being sure they could support it. When they had reset the router they should have moved heaven and earth to get the customer's broadband working again. Under no circumstances should they have walked away and marked the ticket closed.
Plusnet should not have done what they did if all the facts were made available before the reset was tried. He should not have 'messed' with the BT router. He should not have left your friend without calling him/her back.
The facts were all available as far as I know - my friend would have answered all questions put to her as honestly and as capably as she knew how. She could easily have provided the router model (as we have shown she did at some point) - she is certainly capable of providing the wifi "name" i.e. SSID to demonstrate that the router had been configured away from defaults. The technician only needed to ask the right questions of a non-technical customer to find this stuff out.
I'm starting to see more reasons for quitting this ISP, some of these posts are rather worrying.
Actually, I don't think that this post is ANY justification for either you or I moving away from PlusNet - I am only no longer a plusnet customer because I no longer own property in the UK, not because I have had bad service. PlusNet service has always been excellent - but I know enough to keep it on the straight and narrow and not do anything stupid (not that I haven't done my own share of stupid stuff to my own equipment over the years) and if they did get me to do something stupid like reset the router I am capable of sorting it out. So why should technically competent people like us worry? They are very capable of e.g. getting the line fixed - and that is exactly what we need when things go wrong because we can fix stuff on our own equipment.
It is customers like my friend who are non-technical but who have asked a friend like me to tweak their router so e.g. they have a nice SSID name who need to worry.
--------------------
As an aside, the other bad experience was for the person who bought my house. The plan was that she would become a PlusNet customer so that we could simply to pass over the broadband connection and phone line. She phoned PlusNet up and was told that this was not possible and she should sign up with a different ISP altogether. She decided to go with BT who then mis-sold her fibre broadband (when we were too far from the green box and she would get marginally slower speeds than ADSL) and sold her 4G backup when there was no 4G signal. She ended up paying 4x the price we had for the same OpenReach ADSL service.
Another bad BT experience - I decided to switch phone line from BT to PlusNet because it was a bit cheaper. I might well have gone back to BT at a later date. But they tried to persuade me to cancel my PlusNet contract by falsely claiming that I was still in contract and would have to pay cancellation fees. That was a major breach of trust - so now I will NEVER be a BT customer again in a million years. Own goal.
