Plusnet, are the wheels coming off?

[#1]

I have said this before so apologies to anybody who has read my previous rant on this subject.
You would have thought that PlusNet would have learned from their folly in 2007 when they offered UNLIMITED usage at £21 per month. This attracted all of the rabid usage hogs and came close to crippling the service and financial viability of PlusNet.
Ian Wild realised this and the next generation(s) of products were all EXPLICITlY sold with usage limits and speed profiles advertised to deter the high rollers. The result of this was that all of the hogs migrated to Entanet, Sky, TalkTalk and the like who advertised UNLIMITED usage and their plight is now history.
I was astounded when the new regime ousted Ian and embaked on a "(usage base) growth at any cost" strategy. There is a disconnect between the Suits who are defining the Product set and the Techies and hardworking service personnel who are struggling to tweak the Ellacoya Profiles or whitewash the forum opinions which correctly highlight the issues.
The current regime to consider::
That every additional unprofitable customer brings an additional LOSS
That User Base growth is only desirable if it is Profitable
That buying Services is very different to buying Commodities. Specification is not measured across the counter.
That even BT let this disgruntled customer out of a long contract rather than suffer my dissatisfaction.
That you had better have a containment plan for when the 18 month contact lock in period ends.
How you are going to cook the books to achieve next years' Bonus targets?

[#2]

I wonder how much all those free routers cost?
Surely a lot of these people already have a few spare routers?
I can see one new boxed router "THOMSON TG585 V7 WIRELESS ADSL BROADBAND ROUTER NEW"
only £10-50 (and counting) +£6 p&p on Ebay...
Recall that BT (Global) have to pay for those thousands of people they made redundant.
Their income is negative.
They are trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel - they don't care about 18 months time.
What makes me laugh is that they had a lot of customers who were quite content with some of the more highly priced BBYW products
who used their connection for browsing and streaming - who have switched to cheaper "unlimited" contracts.
So they still get priority internet (and more of it!) - for less money!
These people were probably never going to leave, so the 12/18 month contract is wasted.

[#3]

Quote from: Santiago

Are Plusnet signing up so many new customers that they can disregard the "problems" and let customers drift away to other ISPs?

Not at all. Yes, we're signing up more customers, but we're certainly not ignoring or disregarding customers problems. I think it's important to note that we've made a series of fairly significant product changes of late and no matter how hard we try to mitigate the potential for problems it's never going to be 100% plain sailing.
There's more capacity due this week, we're employing more staff and whilst we've quite a large volume of faults under investigation at the moment, it's certainly been higher in the past and things aren't overly indicative of a widespread speed problem.

Quote from: glloyd

I seem to recall we have been here before a couple of years back. All of a suden the penny will drop and fingers will get pulled out again, we hope.

I think we're some way off where we were a few years back tbh.

Quote from: coastergrotto

It takes hours for me to download Eggheads yet when staying with a friend who has Virgin Media it takes 7 minutes.

Are you using the iPlayer? If so can you not stream the program in real time instead of download it?

Quote from: community

(just for the record, my own still ongoing problem is the disappearance for me of the betawebmail!)

Which is a closed platform that was never officially launched as a beta so to be fair it's unrealistic to expect the normal level of support for the platform. I've looked at your problem numerous times but am really struggling to see anything wrong I'm afraid. I've just dropped a reply into the thread here.

Quote from: paulgul

Quote from: Spider People seem to be reluctant to pay extra for the unthrottled service that Plusnet provides. Would paying extra provide an unthrottled service? the product I'm on (BBYW2) is supposed to be un-throttled before 2pm but the usenet speeds are useless, so if thats unthrottled then whats the point in paying extra and changing products.

See here, whilst there aren't any rate limits on the BBYW product before 2pm, Usenet traffic is still in the lower priority traffic queues (On Pro *everything* is in Gold or above).

Quote from: mal0z

AS there are no specific questions for PN - maybe the staff on duty don't feel they should and are waiting for more senior staff to log on ?

Were any of us logged in at the time? As some of you know, we're not as readily available over the weekend.

Quote from: SteveA

I don't think its wheels coming off but I do wonder if sometimes things are being done in a bit of a rush without thinking things through. Look at some of the recent configuration changes which were done between 7am and 9am. Surely someone somewhere should have realised that for a lot of people 7-9am is quite an important time to have a working internet connection.

Which is something we've taken on board and will consider the next time we have some similar work scheduled. I did mention this elsewhere recently but it's probably been buried in another thread somewhere.

Quote from: Be3G

As for the wheels coming off... to some extent I think they are. I'm certain that the customer support isn't what it once was, hence my decision to avoid using Contact Us wherever possible and just bring queries straight to the forums instead.

I'm a bit confused by this Thomas, if you rarely enlist the help of the Customer Support Centre then it seems odd that you've so much certainty that the level of support has deteriorated. We do have some newer staff on board and as you can probably expect, it'll take a while for some of them to get up to speed.
Regarding your other points, we're aware that the performance of the network has left a little to be desired of late. I'm sure that the increases in streaming use haven't gone unnoticed at other ISPs, it's just that the impact is far more visible where we traffic manage certain traffic quite aggressively. There are packages that don't suffer these problems, and for those that do, we're taking measures to get back on top of this. I don't think the frequency of the recent traffic management maintenance has helped and that's something I think we need to learn from.

Quote from: Wheel_nut

I was astounded when the new regime ousted Ian.

For the record, Ian was not 'ousted'.
I'm also not convinced about your reference to Unlimited offerings of days past. The 'bandwidth hogs' you refer to would be hard pushed to download excessive amounts of traffic given the rate limits in place on the unlimited account during the busier times. It's important to note that we didn't have this protection in place the last time round. I might ask Dave whether or not he's got some usage trending knocking about somewhere that we can share with you.
In summary, I don't think the 'wheels are falling off' although this thread does concern me. Our churn rates aren't suggestive of widespread dissatisfaction but there's clearly a few issues that we need to address.

[#4]

Quote from: Bob

Were any of us logged in at the time? As some of you know, we're not as readily available over the weekend.

When I checked  - no there weren't Bob -

[#5]

I thought the Comms Team were permanently hard-wired into the PN network.
Thanks for a thorough post though Bob

[#6]

Quote from: Bob

Quote from: SteveA I don't think its wheels coming off but I do wonder if sometimes things are being done in a bit of a rush without thinking things through. Look at some of the recent configuration changes which were done between 7am and 9am. Surely someone somewhere should have realised that for a lot of people 7-9am is quite an important time to have a working internet connection. Which is something we've taken on board and will consider the next time we have some similar work scheduled. I did mention this elsewhere recently but it's probably been buried in another thread somewhere.

Indeed you did Bob, but I think that the point I was trying to make is that it shouldn't have happened - that someone should have thought it through first. I know its much harder to look at "Active" connections with always on compared to dial up but it shouldn't have taken people posting lots of messages in here for PN to realise that it wasn't the best of times. I think we all accept that emergency changes have to be done as and when but normally planned work really should be scheduled to cause minimal disruption.

[#7]

Thanks for a good and sensitive reply Bob.  Like many things in life there is some inertia involved, so many users having reached the 'tipping point' where they are prepared to Go Public with their problems , the phenomena will roll on for a while.
For me the key message is in your last sentence.  Given your track record in really getting underneath the issues I feel somewhat relieved that something should come out of this saga to the benefit of all users
maurice

[#8]

Thank you Bob for your very thorough post. However, from reading this...

Quote from: Bob

I'm a bit confused by this Thomas, if you rarely enlist the help of the Customer Support Centre then it seems odd that you've so much certainty that the level of support has deteriorated.

...it would appear you're not entirely convinced that I'm being pragmatic in my assessment of the CSC. To be fair, you are right that I used to use the ticket system very rarely - perhaps only once or twice a year. However, this year I've had to raise a number of tickets, two to effect product changes, and the rest to try and sort out problems, most of which have been caused by Plusnet. And my general feeling really is that the support has gone downhill. A couple of years ago I could raise a ticket and, if it was sent to the general CSC pool, look forward to getting a response in a matter of a few hours - on occasion even just a couple. These days however that never happens; nearly all responses are above the stated average closure time, and some of them are significantly slower than that. As a result, even for the tickets where only one or two responses have been needed, I've so far this year not experienced one instance of a ticket being closed within the stated times. Furthermore, on two occasions members of the CSC have made mistakes that have caused problems (one to the effect of >£80), and on one occasion they couldn't even seem to read what I was writing.
To give you a proper idea, I've looked through my ticket history from the beginning of this year, and summarised my experience with each ticket I have raised (with one exception being a ticket that was actually raised by staff, having spoken to them on IRC). Sorry to the rest of the forum users who might not be interested in reading this, but I think it is important to provide proof of what really is happening.
Ticket: 29584578
Raised: 04/08/09
Slowest response: 1d 5h 13m - unjustifiable as was in a general pool
Purpose: getting a VoIP problem sorted
Quality of support: unknown as Bob jumped in and sorted things for me.
Ticket: 29025620
Raised: 08/06/09
Slowest response: 17h 27m - unjustifiable as occurred during Monday daytime
Purpose: getting a stuck IP profile on PN's side adjusted
Quality of support: abominable. Was like banging head against a brick wall - kept getting useless stock replies which had nothing to do with problem; the agents seemed to think I was raising a fault despite me categorically saying I wasn't.
Ticket: 28777406
Raised: 12/05/09
Slowest response: 11h 44m - acceptable, but still slower than advertised
Purpose: changing to Plusnet Value
Quality of support: not good. CSA got me charged an upgrade fee of £83.85 by mistake, and rather than informing me in product change ticket, she raised a different ticket (28780303) with no e-mail notification. Therefore only discovered mistake because I thought 'hmm, I wouldn't put it past PN to have messed something up here, I'd best check my service notices etc. to make sure it's gone smoothly'.
Ticket: 28717912
Raised: 06/05/09
Slowest response: 14h 7m - again, slower than advertised
Purpose: trying to get a referral discount problem fixed
Quality of support: Ok I guess. CSA basically just told me to wait indefinitely for the problem to be fixed at some point in the future, which wasn't terribly satisfactory, but I suppose nothing more could be expected without hassling the developers.
Ticket: 28045440
Raised: 03/03/09
Slowest response: 15h 46m - unacceptable for the CSC pool
Purpose: sorting out Direct Debit problems
Quality of support: this one's different because it was actually initially 'raised' on IRC in discussion with a member of PN staff who can often be found there. That member of staff took a kind of personal responsibility to sort my problem out for me, and was very good at doing so. However, as soon as it was passed over to the general CSC pool for someone else to deal with, the ticket system was back to its usual tricks with the long wait mentioned above.
Ticket: 27681159
Raised: 26/01/09
Slowest response: 1d 10h 21m - unacceptable for the CSC pool
Purpose: signing up to 10GB BBYW1 + HP offer
Quality of support: not good; I was told in the ticket that my new broadband product would become effective from my next billing date, but instead it was changed a week and a half earlier. This caused things to get all messed up, with me effectively losing 5GB of usage I'd already paid for at the beginning of the month (BBYW2), and also causing my billing date to unexpectedly change - which was annoying as my previous billing date of the first of the month was very useful.
So I hope it's fairly clear to see why my opinion of the ticket system is rather different to the fast and efficient ideal that Plusnet have in their heads... my experience tells me that actually, it's slow and as likely to cause problems as it is to fix them.

[#9]

Bob:
Reference the downloading of Eggheads on the iPlayer.  I usually watch it in bed after midnight so I suppose I don't have to download it first, I could do as you suggest and stream it in real time.   
The point I was trying to make though is how disappointing it is that it should take so long to download.  One of the reasons I switched to Unlimited was to be able to download iPlayer and Sky Anytime movies at any time of the day instead of the midnight to 8am off peak period.
I'm beginning to wonder if it was a wise move.

[#10]

Right. I'll go through this ticket by ticket and have a look, with an appraisal of what we should have done - I am sorry about the hassles.

Quote from: Be3G

Ticket: 29584578 Raised: 04/08/09 Slowest response: 1d 5h 13m - unjustifiable as was in a general pool Purpose: getting a VoIP problem sorted Quality of support: unknown as Bob jumped in and sorted things for me.

This one was passed straight into the VoIP pool and would have been picked up the same day as Bob answered it (if Bob hadn't answered it of course).

Quote from: Be3G

Ticket: 29025620 Raised: 08/06/09 Slowest response: 17h 27m - unjustifiable as occurred during Monday daytime Purpose: getting a stuck IP profile on PN's side adjusted Quality of support: abominable. Was like banging head against a brick wall - kept getting useless stock replies which had nothing to do with problem; the agents seemed to think I was raising a fault despite me categorically saying I wasn't.

Textbook case of the agents not reading the full ticket and responding to the latest update. I'll pick this up with them and can only apologise - this should not have happened.

Quote from: Be3G

Ticket: 28777406 Raised: 12/05/09 Slowest response: 11h 44m - acceptable, but still slower than advertised Purpose: changing to Plusnet Value Quality of support: not good. CSA got me charged an upgrade fee of £83.85 by mistake, and rather than informing me in product change ticket, she raised a different ticket (28780303) with no e-mail notification. Therefore only discovered mistake because I thought 'hmm, I wouldn't put it past PN to have messed something up here, I'd best check my service notices etc. to make sure it's gone smoothly'.

I see your point about the notification from the charge ticket and we should have notified you that the charge was created. On the other hand, if you hadn't worried and looked at the service notices you wouldn't have noticed it as the incorrect charge was removed, again thanks to the ticket you reference.

Quote from: Be3G

Ticket: 28717912 Raised: 06/05/09 Slowest response: 14h 7m - again, slower than advertised Purpose: trying to get a referral discount problem fixed Quality of support: Ok I guess. CSA basically just told me to wait indefinitely for the problem to be fixed at some point in the future, which wasn't terribly satisfactory, but I suppose nothing more could be expected without hassling the developers.

As you say, we couldn't really have done much else with that ticket though if you had returned it we would have added the problem reference and updated the ticket periodically to advise you of progress on the issue.

Quote from: Be3G

Ticket: 28045440 Raised: 03/03/09 Slowest response: 15h 46m - unacceptable for the CSC pool Purpose: sorting out Direct Debit problems Quality of support: this one's different because it was actually initially 'raised' on IRC in discussion with a member of PN staff who can often be found there. That member of staff took a kind of personal responsibility to sort my problem out for me, and was very good at doing so. However, as soon as it was passed over to the general CSC pool for someone else to deal with, the ticket system was back to its usual tricks with the long wait mentioned above.

This should have been picked up earlier in the day, it's true. Sorry for that.

Quote from: Be3G

Ticket: 27681159 Raised: 26/01/09 Slowest response: 1d 10h 21m - unacceptable for the CSC pool Purpose: signing up to 10GB BBYW1 + HP offer Quality of support: not good; I was told in the ticket that my new broadband product would become effective from my next billing date, but instead it was changed a week and a half earlier. This caused things to get all messed up, with me effectively losing 5GB of usage I'd already paid for at the beginning of the month (BBYW2), and also causing my billing date to unexpectedly change - which was annoying as my previous billing date of the first of the month was very useful.

Yes, the agent who added the offer made the change on the same day unfortunately. It also seems that the change in billing date requested on your earlier ticket (the one created from IRC) led to the direct debit being removed in order that payment wouldn't fail over the period that the billing date was being changed, so that clears one thing up.

Quote from: Be3G

So I hope it's fairly clear to see why my opinion of the ticket system is rather different to the fast and efficient ideal that Plusnet have in their heads... my experience tells me that actually, it's slow and as likely to cause problems as it is to fix them.

I don't think that the majority of customers have that experience fortunately. Obviously some of the issues you mention could have been handled better and we're always working to improve these. Hopefully that'll show next time you have cause to raise a ticket.

[#11]

Quote

I don't think that the majority of customers have that experience fortunately. Obviously some of the issues you mention could have been handled better and we're always working to improve these. Hopefully that'll show next time you have cause to raise a ticket.

am affarid i am with be3g the tickets need to be answerd some what quicker. waiting 15+ hours would be ok but  most the agents just read the last comment and in most cases give a bog standard copy paste reply to some very technical problems and when you know u have to wait another 15 hours for an agent to pick up that you are not happy with there non informative copy paste answer it makes you want to bang your head against a brick wall.
i know my first port of call for most problems i know can be sorted pretty easy is james instead of playing ticket tennis

[#12]

Who is the Customer Services Manager these days. Is it still Carole Axe? If so, does she monitor these pages?

[#13]

Thanks Matt for your analysis. However, I should point out that I have actually already complained about some of those tickets, so it might not be worth hassling the agents involved a second time. The point of listing all those ticket experiences this time wasn't to complain about the individual tickets themselves; rather, it was to show Plusnet the overall picture that their ticket system has painted for me. Having said that, I do have a few responses to your investigation...

Quote from: orbrey

This one was passed straight into the VoIP pool and would have been picked up the same day as Bob answered it (if Bob hadn't answered it of course).

To clarify, this ticket (as far as I'm aware) began in the general CSC pool as I had to use the little 'raise a ticket' link as the help assistant didn't give me any useful options for raising a ticket directly to the VoIP team. It then took 1d 5h simply for the ticket to get moved to the correct pool, and then another 1d 7h for the ticket to get looked at by Bob. Making a total of over 2.5 days between me raising the ticket and getting the first bit of proper assistance. That really is not acceptable for a ticket raised during the working week.

Quote from: orbrey

I see your point about the notification from the charge ticket and we should have notified you that the charge was created. On the other hand, if you hadn't worried and looked at the service notices you wouldn't have noticed it as the incorrect charge was removed, again thanks to the ticket you reference.

Ah but that's not what the ticket I referenced said: it was the charge would be refunded, not removed. 'Refunded' implies that the money would be debited from the bank account, only to be credited again a few days later. Which really would not have been acceptable as the bank account in question is operated very carefully and doesn't necessarily have £80 for PN to just take as they fancy it. However, as soon as I saw what'd happened I complained on this forum; James then promptly phoned me and made sure I actually never got duped with the £80 debit in the first place.

Quote from: orbrey

Yes, the agent who added the offer made the change on the same day unfortunately. It also seems that the change in billing date requested on your earlier ticket (the one created from IRC) led to the direct debit being removed in order that payment wouldn't fail over the period that the billing date was being changed, so that clears one thing up.

Not quite I'm afraid: seeing what an utter mess everything was turning in to I just let the billing date remain as it was rather than trying to get it changed back again. All of the direct debit problems occurred before the billing date restoration was even considered; they're in the same ticket as the ticket was effectively a 'one-stop-shop' for trying to get all of my issues sorted out with the help of the agent from IRC.

Quote from: orbrey

Obviously some of the issues you mention could have been handled better and we're always working to improve these. Hopefully that'll show next time you have cause to raise a ticket.

Let's hope so!

[#14]

Quote from: ASBO

... but  most the agents just read the last comment and in most cases give a bog standard copy paste reply ... it makes you want to bang your head against a brick wall.

That has been my experience too.
In good customer service it is important to achieve consistency, never talking to the same person twice is the biggest failing of any customer support service I have ever had to deal with.
My biggest issue was with my mortgage company, spoke to many people for a simple query, never got the same answer twice to the same question. I had to write them a letter asking the same question, I got a phone call the next day, with a simple reply to a simple question. The reply was not what I expected either and asked them to listen to the recording of the first call I made, and made them honour the reply I had.
PN are clearly trying hard I admit, but there is room for improvement.
SW.

[#15]

Quote from: Be3G

Thanks Matt for your analysis. However, I should point out that I have actually already complained about some of those tickets, so it might not be worth hassling the agents involved a second time. The point of listing all those ticket experiences this time wasn't to complain about the individual tickets themselves; rather, it was to show Plusnet the overall picture that their ticket system has painted for me.

I understand that, Thomas. I responded categorically because I'm quite sure that others reading this thread would rather read a response here than dig through the forum for the threads relating to each ticket

Quote from: Be3G

Having said that, I do have a few responses to your investigation...

Somehow I thought you might.

Quote from: Be3G

To clarify, this ticket (as far as I'm aware) began in the general CSC pool as I had to use the little 'raise a ticket' link as the help assistant didn't give me any useful options for raising a ticket directly to the VoIP team. It then took 1d 5h simply for the ticket to get moved to the correct pool, and then another 1d 7h for the ticket to get looked at by Bob. Making a total of over 2.5 days between me raising the ticket and getting the first bit of proper assistance. That really is not acceptable for a ticket raised during the working week.

Agreed, this isn't good enough and is one of the main reasons we're recruiting new staff at the moment.

Quote from: Be3G

Ah but that's not what the ticket I referenced said: it was the charge would be refunded, not removed. 'Refunded' implies that the money would be debited from the bank account, only to be credited again a few days later. Which really would not have been acceptable as the bank account in question is operated very carefully and doesn't necessarily have £80 for PN to just take as they fancy it. However, as soon as I saw what'd happened I complained on this forum; James then promptly phoned me and made sure I actually never got duped with the £80 debit in the first place.

Yes - because as far as our system is concerned the £83.85 has been charged and refunded, even if that never actually reached your bank account. You can see this on your invoices and the service notices on the account. Unfortunately that's just how the system works.

Quote from: Be3G

Not quite I'm afraid: seeing what an utter mess everything was turning in to I just let the billing date remain as it was rather than trying to get it changed back again. All of the direct debit problems occurred before the billing date restoration was even considered; they're in the same ticket as the ticket was effectively a 'one-stop-shop' for trying to get all of my issues sorted out with the help of the agent from IRC.

Odd. I mentioned that because the agent states that the direct debit was re-added in the response on the 4th of March, which is the same date that your currently active DD was added. In fact in the same response the agent advises that the previous direct debit failed due to an issue with your bank, a fact that you didn't dispute on the ticket at the time. I see what you mean about the billing date though.