My Questions tickets ... Why the pointless promotional text?

[#1]

Just a simple question: Why does each response have three lines appended extoling the virtues of Plusnet home phone, it only goes to bloat the topic.
I can't see it having any value as a promotional tool, since it will surely be seen mainly by customers with ongoing problems. Fortunately in my case the issue is a small matter but in the (hypothetical) case of a prolonged broadband connection issue I can't see someone who might be frustrated enough to think of cancelling outright suddenly thinking "I know, I'll transfer my phone service to Plusnet".

[#2]

Ah-ha! This is one of my gripes too (well, actually, it's part of a much larger gripe). I hadn't noticed the home phone text though - last time I looked, it was advertising referrals.

[#3]

It's also rammed into the middle of the "View My Usage" page as well. It's not even in a nicely named <div> that I can CSS out ... very annoying ....
[Edited to fix link]

[#4]

It's on the login page for WebMail too.
You've gotta love those marketing types - push it hard and push it often

[#5]

Your link doesnt work talpa

try does this
Also Adblock and Firefox gets rid of it

[#6]

I saw that one today for the first time - not impressed!

[#7]

I apologise if this is a little bit like hijacking the OP's thread (mods - feel free to split it out if you desire), but what I want to moan about is entirely related to the thread, just, not in direct reply to it.
I said in my earlier post that the tickets thing was part of a 'larger gripe' - I was planning on venting this gripe another time but it seems that everyone's beating me to it, so I might as well sound off after all. Basically, like everyone else in this thread I'm starting to notice all the adverts absolutely everywhere, and it's doing my head in a little bit because I'm already a paying customer to the company.
To summarise so far, we've already had the following mentioned in this thread:

• Advertisement messages at the end of every ticket reply.


• Banner ad right in the middle of the VMBU page.


• Banner ad at the bottom of the webmail page.

But, there is actually yet more advertising I've noticed and have found annoying. The worst of this I felt, was the end of Dave's recent blog post here. Dave seems to me to be one of the most intelligent people in the company, and his posts are often very informative. But the fact that someone told him to basically turn the end of his post in to a PlusNet advert is cheap and very tacky - and, to be honest, it makes Dave look a bit like a company puppet, which I don't think is the intention.
What else?
Another thing that springs to mind is the referrals message in the e-mail that gets sent out when my account billing has been successful. Yes, I know about referrals thank you very much. Oh, and what about that nice new links pane at the bottom of every community page. Well, half of that is is basically one big search-engine-optimised advert (I am referring to the 'related sites' and 'about PlusNet' sections). In EOD posts we've had people sneaking in bits of advertising in an entirely conspicuous manner.
All in all, there's just too much dratted advertising anywhere. Yes, I know PlusNet need to communicate things to customers who aren't as knowledgeable about their products and services as us. But that's what things like the newsletters are for - and which is why I don't subscribe to them. I don't have anything against normal adverts in normal places - e.g. the banner adds on the community site homepage. They're fine. But forcing adverts down the throats of customers every time they interact with the company (be it via tickets, the portal, community site, whatever) is tiresome. This is England where we do things with restraint, not Russia with its giant billboards everywhere you look.

[#8]

Well said Thomas!
I'm wondering if a poll about this would be useful?

[#9]

Thomas,
Your post can stay - I couldn't have put it better myself 
All I can say is that is that fair enough, direct ads at people viewing from a non PN IP or Non Customer, but to be forcing ads on paying customers is taking a liberty - and (although not much of it, but it adds up up over time)our allowance! 

[#10]

Having ads about other PN services on the front page of the member centre is fair enough. When we go to other pages on the member centre we just want to achieve something - not be distracted with adverts.
Coupled with that we have the stupidity of the latest Plusnet news not being on the member centre - it's only on the front page of www.plus.net - I'd guess most users have portal.plus.net bookmarked. I've attached what appears on the front page.
Could someone give the PR bods a kick in the right direction please - information about other Plusnet services where it is sensible/needed and not where it will only irritate your users.

[#11]

another  funny question, Yes I have the Members Centre bookmarked, I am logged in, I go to the portal and it asks me to log in again - yet all the others  members area's know I am logged in

[#12]

Mmmmh.
Very interesting discussion guys.
As Thomas has mentioned, we are a business, we have to make a profit and we have to sell and indeed upsell.
We are criticised in some quarters for not ensuring that current product offerings are notified to the customer base effectively and we also need to maximise as many sales channels as we can to ensure that we remain a successful business.
I'll start with the messaging on tickets. We identified last year that the number of customers who knew about the referrals scheme was much much smaller than we thought. We already knew that the number of customers who regularly use the portal was not massive. We also know that a large number of our customer base dont actualy read the newsletters. So we had to ensure that the referrals programme reached as many customers as it could. It is our primary sales channel. The impact of the referrals message on the ticket footers was a success and we learned from that. You should bear in mind that the majority of our customers are not disgruntled when they read a ticket response or have a question answered (source customer sat survey) so that messaging didnt have a negative impact. On the contrary it was a success.
So the knowledge of referrals has increased. We looked to the ticket system, amongst other areas, to help promote our fantastic home phone offerings to our existing customer base. This too has worked.
As I have pointed out, the portal doesnt get as muc traffic as we would wish for, webmail does, and the click through rate and the success rate of promoting our services via that means has shown that we are reaching out to more people than before. The same can be said for VMBU. These pages are heavily used so it makes sense to utilise the resource on our door step.
I realise that those of you who post on and indeed visit the forums are very much clued up about our products and services, but out of circa 220k customers the forum community represents smaller audience.
The Community site blogs attract a huge audience from outside our customer base and are massively popular. It would be foolish of us not to recognise the potential that gives. To suggest that Dave is a puppet is wrong and very far from the truth. Dave like the rest of us is proud of our products and services and like many of us will shout about them from the roof tops and rightly so.
We dont spend millions on TV adds or embark on the massive in your face campaigns of some of the other providers. Thats not what we are about, but surely you can't fault us for using the available and effective means to grow and promote our products to as wide an audience as possible thus ensuring that we remain cost effective and sustainable.
I genuinely feel that the methods we are using are inobtrusive and subtle enough and further more successful.

[#13]

There isn't much I can say to that doesn't already repeat things I've said before, but there are a couple of small thins I want to highlight:

Quote from: Mark

You should bear in mind that the majority of our customers are not disgruntled when they read a ticket response or have a question answered (source customer sat survey) so that messaging didnt have a negative impact. On the contrary it was a success.

Customer satisfaction surveys have no bearing on this whatsoever; the surveys are about the help they received, not anything else. Else, you could say that, I don't know, the portal colour scheme is good because the satisfaction surveys say so! (Well, actually, it's not that bad, but you get my point.)

Quote from: Mark

To suggest that Dave is a puppet is wrong and very far from the truth.

I didn't suggest Dave was a puppet - I suggested PlusNet made him look like one - a subtle but important difference.

[#14]

The ticket and customer sat comment was simply intended to address this suggestion Thomas.

Quote

I can't see it having any value as a promotional tool, since it will surely be seen mainly by customers with ongoing problems.

[#15]

Quote from: Mark

I genuinely feel that the methods we are using are inobtrusive and subtle enough and further more successful.

I'm sure they are successful, but inobtrusive they're not. In the "View my Usage" page with advert I have to scroll down to see "This week's Usage". Without the ad it all fits on one page.
If you insist on putting adverts on the page please mark them as such so us "savvy" users can block / hide them (<div class="advert"> or a consistent URL for advert images /adverts/xxxx.gif would be good)