The cost of doing business with PlusNet

[#1]

I just made a call to your business support to buy some more services from you on an existing account. The call queue time was just under 14 minutes. It was 14 minutes wasted time when I couldn't focus on other work.
When I'm consulting for clients that works out at £45 non-billable time. It is the cost of doing business with PlusNet.  If your business broadband service was substantially less than your competitors it might be acceptable.
One of the services I provide is teaching businesses how to save money on meetings. A technique I teach is suggesting to team members that they account for the cost of sitting in meetings. If they don't know their actual cost to their organisation I given them the metric of hourly pay rate x 150%.
Now if PlusNet Executives were to take their annual salary rate, divide by 1650,then multiply it by 1.5 they'd get an approximation of how much they cost per hour.  Then they should trawl through the PN metrics and discover how many customer hours are wasted each day in call queue waiting.
Total cost to business customers per day = Hourly manpower cost x total wasted customer queue hours per day.
Then see if the PN Marketing guys have the nerve to allow this figure to be posted on the PN website!  "We'll do you proud" Grrr!

[#2]

I would accept a hit of an hour or two's wasted time if you got a result at the end of the wait.
Business Support seems to be a poor relation and only operates 9 to 5 Monday to Friday - wish I could get away with just working those hours!
Cheers
Keith

[#3]

AlaricAdair,
We aim to have enough staff to answer calls when they are queuing but we are unable to plan for call spikes. When that happens we have off-line staff jump on calls to help. Sometimes though call wait times can be higher than we would like.
We do have a webchat system which can be found here:
https://portal.plus.net/home-broadband/contact/#biz-primary-choices
Click contact customer services and then start chat. The chat is only available between 09:00 and 17:30 Monday to Friday at this time.
Keith,
Our business support team are available 24/7 by phone, as far as I am aware the buinsess team have never been just Monday to Friday but I could be wrong on that as the team started sometime in 2007 I believe.

[#4]

I used to have the managers of help desks in 24 countries reporting to me. Believe me when I tell you a 15 minute call queue wait in a business environment is not a spike!  It is Failure. The manager would be wondering if my next phone call would be one that shortened his/her career.
If PlusNet management have such poor expectations it is small wonder the delays are so long. How does web chat improve your resource utilisation?

[#5]

@Kev,
I suggest that there a bit of light bending here on both sides.  Yes, there always has been 24/7 support for BUSINESS customers however at weekends and 'quite times' (business out of hours) support was handled by the RESIDENTIAL team.
The good news is that 24/7 business support is now handled by the business support team, however as per AlaricAdair comments, call wait times have increased quite substantially since 2013.  These are not one off peak times; as you are aware I've had reason to call repeatedly recently and back in 2013.  The call wait time is 2-3x what it used to be.
Kevin