plus.net average fault ticket response times - are they actually right?

[#1]

I'm increasingly wondering if the average ticket response times are actually right, or if I've understood what they mean.
For example, you can currently see:
Connection faults:
Average closure time 2 days, 20 hours, 52 minutes and 21 seconds
Target closure time   7 working days
I've currently got a fault ticket open - the first response took 5 days and a prompting on these forums, the next response took 3 days, and the response after that (booking an engineer after I confirmed my availability) took 3 days.
Now I in no way have a degree in advanced statistics, but if tickets are sitting in a queue 3 days+ before they get any kind of response, how can the average closure time be less than 3 days?
(I understand their may currently be issues due to the weather, but I can show another couple of tickets that show exactly the same pattern, and I believe the current ticket started well before the snow did.)
[My actual ticket currently has a BT engineer visit booked, so I'm not asking for anyone to help with the fault, just trying to understand why things seem to take so much longer than the average closure time suggests they should be taking.]
Cheers,
Joseph

[#2]

HI Joseph,
I think the operative word is 'average' so there are probably lots of less complex issues that take much less time to resolve.
Jojo

[#3]

Thanks for the response Jojo - I'm not sure I fully understand though - are you saying there's a separate queue for "simple" fault tickets, or that people might be looking at the ticket queue and thinking "wow, that looks hard, I'll just leave it in the queue for someone else and find a simpler one to do"?
A bit more detail: the first 5 day response the only actual response was "We'll raise this to BT and see what they say" - 5 days to say that seems extreme, and if it took 5 days to give that simple response which kind of fault ticket actual gets a response in under 3 days?
Is there something misleading about how these average times are calculated? Do they only take into account the time between the last customer response and the time the ticket is resolved? Would it be more correct (or at least set customer expectations better) to display the average length of time that current open fault tickets have been open instead?
I do get the feeling there's a big oddity in the ticket system that needs to be raised up and investigated - it seems like a ticket stays high up a queue and gets progressed quickly once it gets "assigned" to someone, but if you miss a call from plus.net and respond online instead you end up in a ticket pool that takes days to get dealt with. Maybe I should just give up with the ticket system and phone in everytime.

[#4]

Quote from: jheenan

...... Maybe I should just give up with the ticket system and phone in everytime.

lol you can then compare the time it takes to answer the call, against the call waiting time displayed on the support website. 

[#5]

I'd hope the phone call stats are easier to calculate and hence right 🙂
At least the phone stats list a maximum waiting time - I'd hazard a guess the oldest fault ticket open would probably have been open at least 3 months!

[#6]

You'd be surprised what the longest ticket actually is.  I'm not going to tell you the actual answer, but it's about a line install case that has been open for a very long time and relates to problems with local planning (presumably digging up a road).
The ticket figures are correct - but account for all tickets, some of which are script one, some answered quickly, etc.
I'd also expect the faults ones to be the same, but there are a number of faults tickets which aren't actually faults and as such resolved very quickly.

[#7]

Quote from: Jameseh

You'd be surprised what the longest ticket actually is.  I'm not going to tell you the actual answer, but it's about a line install case that has been open for a very long time and relates to problems with local planning (presumably digging up a road).

Quote from: Jameseh

The ticket figures are correct - but account for all tickets, some of which are script one, some answered quickly, etc. I'd also expect the faults ones to be the same, but there are a number of faults tickets which aren't actually faults and as such resolved very quickly.

Do you think it could perhaps then be construed as not really giving customers a useful idea of how long it might take a fault to be resolved if the average includes things that aren't fault?
Is it actually the case there aren't any genuine faults that are resolved in less than the stated current "average" time to resolve fault? (Currently standing at 2 days and 20 hours.)  [Okay, I guess there might be some faults that get fixed without plus.net intervention.]

To put it another way, speaking as a customer who's had to raise a fault several times this year, it is hugely frustrating to raise a fault ticket, look and see that the "average" time to fix fault tickets is 2 days, then have to plead on this forum for someone to look at the ticket because it has apparently been completely ignored for 5 days.
If this had just happened once then fair enough, bad luck or something, but it's happened to me several times, and there seem to be quite a few posters on this forum with similar experiences.