Plusnet, are the wheels coming off?
Quote from: orbrey Somehow I thought you might.
Cheeky.
Quote from: orbrey 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.
Fair enough - and obviously I'm glad that the charge never reached the bank account. My point is simply that I had no idea at the time that PN would be able to reverse the charge before it reached the bank; normally the way PN refund money (which they've had to do quite a few times now...) is the money gets taken then I have to wait perhaps a week or more for it to be credited again. Hence my initial concern and forum rant about it.
Quote from: orbrey 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.
Well, you'll find I've not actually accused PN of being the ones to cause the DD problems in this thread or elsewhere. I do however suspect they might have been the ones who caused the problem: Barclays blamed PN (ticket 28045440 response 1:26pm 04/03), PN blamed Barclays (following response), and it has to be said my confidence in Barclays is greater than my confidence in PN. However, without knowing for certain I've not gone around blaming PN for the issue. In fact, to be quite honest, I haven't a clue what happened really with the direct debits. It all got in to such a muddle (same ticket, 9:36pm 18/03) that I didn't know what to think and just crossed my fingers that it'd all eventually work, which thankfully it did.
But anyway, I think we're getting sidetracked here - the intention of this thread isn't to try and apportion blame for the DD fiasco. The real problem under discussion here is the quality and speed of Plusnet's support, which I hope I've demonstrated does need some marked improvements in places... and I'm glad to see, from godsell and Asbo's replies, that I'm not the only one to think that way.
Well yes of course, obviously I'm not glad that people are having problems - what I meant is that I'm glad I'm not just some lone supporter of the notion that improvements need to be made. 
Quote from: Jameseh
Quote How much does 2Tb of data transfer cost Plusnet, wholesale? Bet it isn't much.
I believe that it's in the region of £1500-2000.
So, around £1 per gigabyte transferred? Seems excessive, especially given the bulk Plusnet will be buying. Put a different way, the value option costs £5.99 in Market 3. That provides 10Gb of data allowance. So, you can, theoretically squeeze 200 value customers onto that 2Tb for a revenue of £1198. I'm a little puzzled. There's a discrepancy of a minimum of £300 here, and potentially £700. So we're to believe that Plusnet are subsidising value customers to the tune of up to £3.50 per customer every month? And that's purely data allowance - how do you pay for overheads, capital expenditure, operating costs? That alone would add another £3-£5 per punter. All of that before any notion of a profit margin.
Are you sure it isn't more like £150 - £200?
I have to be honest, though. I still find the notion of targeting Market three customers with deep discounting cynical - after all, the message is clearly that you don't care about the customers without choice - only those who may opt onto an LLU provider. It has nothing to do with fairness.
Quote The concerns you have raised that the issues being reported have been raised at Director level, I don't see to be something that should be massively concerning. There's a Director (albeit under the name of a General Manager) who direct responsibility is that of the CSC and responsible to ensure that the CSC is delivering to the targets set. Yes, these targets will contain elements of call waiting times, ticket closure and so on, however, there is also a customer sat & dissat target, which we calculate based on survey responses, as you know. We'll send out a survey on every 5th closed contact on an account. Of course, not everyone will answer these, but I'd like to think it gives a relatively realistic overview of the customers that do contact us.
Okay - I can accept that a GM would have input to the process, after all, the responsibility of a GM is to ensure the business, as a whole, is operating in accordance with the Director's plan.
The inference that a Director had become involved with the "issues" - i.e. the problems in part being reported here - is what is concerning, since the way what Mark wrote read, was that the management in place to deal with these things on a daily basis was not doing so - for any number of possible reasons (I am NOT suggesting incompetence). And clearly, that has been the case to some extent, since there are a potentially large number of concerns about the same core issues in here at present. My own experiences, for example, don't bode well for an indication of efficient customer support.
Key among my concerns would be the reality reported here versus the "average times" published on your site. Why are they so far apart at present - drastically far apart? I mean, a brief read of the forums here shows that my experiences aren't atypical of the current general experiences of CSC. It seems that many here do not get the action they need until personal involvement by guys like yourself, or James, or Mark. And you cannot keep claiming they are isolated incidents, that the ball was dropped, that you're learning from it - too many to rely on those get-outs.
I am sure you can understand my frustration - that even after (I believe) around a month, I am still struggling to get what are to my mind, basic questions answered - simple issues resolved. And frankly, that frustration just accelerates when I know that directors, or GM's are involved, and still nothing moves.
Bill.