setting expectations and failure to communicate.

[#1]

Dear Plusnet Overlords.

I ordered broadband on the 23rd March with an engineer visit scheduled for today 11th April 2016 between 8:00am and 1:00pm - I received a text and email confirming as such. However at no time during the previous communication including the day I ordered was it made clear that an engineer would not in fact visit my house. I'm putting the recording of that call online I've edited out the girls name and my personal details https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkTSUqPqsGE apart from taking the day off my only other dissapointment with this was i was unable to "geek" it out with a fellow techy. Fair enough I know services can be activated remotely and line testing will be done on a suck and see principle. 

not only that, I've not been receiving any text or message updates today apart from one telling me my phone line was ready to use. 

Back to my broadband - I spoke to your very affable staff today who promised me that my broadband would be activated at some point between lunchtime and midnight tonight. Its now 8:30pm and no sign of any dsl signal on my filtered phone line. I have three known good filters and a second dsl modem handy just in case.

Not that i'm too worried, but given the false expectations already set, I'm now expecting this also to be a misleading promise.  

Is there any way to obtain a more detailed report of broadband activation(i.e the engineer visited the exchange and found a rat had chewed through the patch panels leaving one very fat rat and.... oh! no internet for Mr Customer)?

Does an engineer even need to visit the cabinet/exchange? Was there a missed schedule? Did Elmur Fud ever catch that rabbit? Do plusnet do broadband? 

Yours hopefully

Mr Customer

[#2]

Hi Chris,

Taking a look at this now. I'll update the thread shortly.

[#3]

Cheers Matty,

On another note - I received a text today saying an engineer would visit my house on the 13th between 8:00am and 1:00pm. Should I believe this and take another day off work?  On a side note, my bad luck with things seemed to stem from the weekend where a planned fishing trip to Loch Shiel ended before it began....you see, we arranged for a fishing permit and small boat hire from a chap that runs a farm on the banks of Loch Shiel and we travelled up there early on Saturday morning only to get the the farm and find that the boat engine was out of commission due to an unexpected fight with some rocks from the previous group. Undeterred the farmer worked tirelessly to get the engine working while we fruitlessly cast our lines from the shore. Finally at about lunchtime the farmer came down to the shore with some food prepared by his wife and told us the bad news - no boat would be available today unless we wished to try rowing.  Needless to say the farmer not only waived the cost of the fishing permit but since we had travelled all the way to loch sheil(about 3-4 hours drive from Glasgow) he offered us a chance to return this weekend promising a new engine and we would only need to pay for the permit.  This was great customer service on the back of a failure. Now compared to plusnet....you know the rest. P.S. I should point out that I did not in fact record the call ordering the broadband...but if your not getting it by now I like to embellish my stories with tantalising B.S. to get things moving a bit quicker. sorry for your pain.  Back to work for me...typing more B.S. Loch Sheil is Beautiful, its where they filmed Hogwarts in those Harry Potter novels.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Let me assure you that uploading a phone call to YouTube hasn't really sped up the chances of your case being picked up.

Is there any way to obtain a more detailed report of broadband activation(i.e the engineer visited the exchange and found a rat had chewed through the patch panels leaving one very fat rat and.... oh! no internet for Mr Customer)?

I've just gotten off the phone with Openreach. Somebody went to the cab yesterday to wire you up, but it seemed that there was a problem with the wiring and that the jumpering had not been done properly. Bit frustrating that they didn't let you know and you have been left in the lurch. Big apologies on that one.

They are having another go at it tomorrow, hence the text you've just received now. Hopefully - a bit like your fishing trip - it should be a bit more plain sailing from this point onwards. Could you be in the property tomorrow per chance?

Matty

[#5]

Cheers Matty,

Tell the engineer to bring a rod - we'll all be here telling stories.

Chris

[#6]

Update: Fibre Broadband miraculously started working this morning at some point between 1:00am and 8:55am with no engineer visit needed....I have mixed feelings about this one is ...."yay! - 27MB downstream, Latency sub 20ms" and the other "what did the openreach engineer do today that he couldn't do on Monday?" I suspect that openreach are running their trainset in a very odd way. Anyway I'm jacked in and good to go. In case you can't tell by the thread I'm a new customer and my only disappointment with Plusnet was their failure to provide clear communication. Might be a good idea to communicate the "Openreach anomaly" to your staff on their next soft skills course.

But hey I've got broadband so what do I care. - Going to be stress testing it with some replication between a couple of AWS EC2 instances and my own private cloud so be warned....just kidding I'm just a residential user - now where is that VPN software I had......

[#7]

Glad to hear that it's been fixed for you Chris.