Chat queue - shocking

[#1]

@HarryB what is causing this sudden and sustained increase in wait times ?

My guess is this , PN have been adverting quite aggressive recently , with free broadband , and free money to take free broadband.

All these customers have know gone live and there is simply not enough staff to cope with the amount of customers in a timely manner, and now it's a game of catch up ( to get more new staff trained) whilst the customer is left to suffer bad customers service , because PN once again , fail to plan properly .

PN this is history repeating itself, yet you seem happy to make the same mistakes time and time again 

At the time of writing you have been open 1hr 30mins , and already average wait time 28 mins, simply shocking 

Regards
Mike

[#2]

Still better than dialling that 101 non-emergency number, and they have to pay for the privilege 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11916888/Dont-bother-calling-101-non-emergency-number-b...

[#3]

The reason people called up asking for progress on tickets is because there had been no response.

If tickets were triaged and those that were going to be referred to a queue that would take longer sent an email giving likely time.

The basic problem is the same as it has been for the last 5 years - the numbers of support staff is always lagging behind the increase in user numbers.

One thing I can absolutely guarantee is that Plusnet will never publish their churn rate - I bet it's one of the highest in the industry!

[#4]

I'm still waiting for the broadband to start working after moving house. Numerous days when it's supposed to be active have come and gone, and that's mainly thanks to BTOR not doing their bit, and at one point saying, in effect, "yeah, we promised to have it done Friday but we didn't get round to it and we don't work weekends so maybe it'll get done on Monday..." PN are pushed to give completion dates but that's pointless if they're dependent on BTOR and its mañana approach.

[#5]

jelv and the only answer we get is https://careers.plus.net/jobs/  we are recruiting

And we have been told this for past 5 years

[#6]

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@tstaddon wrote:

BTOR and its mañana approach.

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I think you'll find that the official BT policy is to do things dreckly*.

* A Cornish word similar in meaning to mañana but without the same sense of urgency that mañana conveys.

[#7]

I bow to the infinitely greater technical knowledge of tstaddon in posts 26 and 29 of this thread. I am but a dot in his rear view mirror, so these further comments are made with respect.

A lot of people, including myself, are bemoaning the withdrawal of the ticket system, and complaining about wait times on both phone and chat.

tstaddon, in the first of those posts says: "Tech-savvy people tend to create a ticket and chuck every bit of information plus the kitchen sink in so make it easier to use that feature - it often saves hours of time."

I presume that he means a saving of time for the person handling the ticket, and of course there is a vast saving of time for the customer, compared with hanging on for an hour or more for phone or chat. In post 26 tstaddon endorses ticket systems and makes interesting constructive suggestions regarding their operation, which I applaud.

However, in a thread expressing dissatisfaction with the current wait times for chat, I am a little surprised by his remark in post 29: "Actually, I like the chat feature. It's far better than phoning for issue tracking, because the user can maintain a chat log and see who they spoke to, at what time, and what responses they were given."

Maintaining your own chat log is obviously better than phoning, but still a poor second to a ticket system when it comes to both parties  having access to a written record. (It is a shame, though, that the ticket system can't be viewed by customers in a "flat" mode which would make for easier reading.)

tstaddon goes further to endorse chat by saying "Other thing to remember about chat windows is you can have more than one of them open at a time, so there's no real reason why a techie can't be chatting to 4 or 5 different people at once."

Maybe this hints at the root of the problem! In my post 28, I said: "Here's a thought ........... if problems actually got solved, more issues were fixed first time instead of being passed around or incorrectly actioned, we the pesky customers wouldn't have to waste a percentage of our lives in a Plusnet queue."

Could it be that chatting to four or five people at once isn't conducive to the proper assimilation of a customer's problem or the implementation of a comprehensive first time fix?

During my own recent bad experience of chat, (the one where I was kept waiting for over an hour,) the representative started quoting from someone else's ticket! The session was then abruptly terminated, perhaps as he chatted to four or five others!

The issue which I wished to address (described on another thread) has already been acknowledged by Plusnet as arising from poor communication on their part. Didn't they feel that I deserved a better resolution than wasting an hour and a quarter of my time on a chat session which proved abortive, maybe because the representative was chatting to four or five others?

With my then having to address the issue all over again, doesn't this prove my point that the root cause of overwhelming demand for chat or phone may lie in a poor rate of first-time fixes? Do it right, and do it once !!!!

As has been mentioned by others in this thread, we must acknowledge Plusnet's dependency upon Openreach. Openreach being owned by BT, which also owns Plusnet must lead to some curious relationships and communication issues which cannot help the problems which we are talking about. I am happy to read in today's paper that although a breakup was narrowly avoided a few months ago, the matter is now under review again.

[#8]

Cheers arktos!

Yes, it certainly helps if you know the techie's going to have to go through a script of sanity checks and you can provide all that up front.

For example, I'm likely to bounce a call in at some point if the fibre still appears to be not activated when I get home... and I can state in advance:

The house address, the phone number, the prior ticket references, the make/model of the VDSL2 filtered faceplate, the MAC address of the Hub One I received, confirm it's connected and powered on, provide photo evidence of which lights are on, cover off the troubleshooting steps already followed, and alternative contact details.

When I said I like the chat feature, I mean instant messaging for general queries. The Plusnet implementation is a tad odd in that you have a queue system and I assume it's only one-to-one. I have had dozens of customers, support partners, colleagues and even PN people on instant messenger in the past and it works best for quick enquiries to specific people who you know are working on something, e.g.

1. For a sales / marketing team picking up IMs or monitoring Twitter/Facebook, customers/prospective customers need to be able to ping a quick question about a product and get a quick answer - no point ticketing these but by virtue of them being electronic it is logged so you can generate metrics, spot trends, identify frequently asked questions, and highlight ambiguous or missing information on the website / tweaks needed on the website to make that information easier to find. (For example, people not being able to find the ticketing system. If I'd been in charge at PN and had that many questions about it I'd have ordered a big orange button called "Raise or review my support tickets" to be put somewhere very obvious on the home page, not make it even harder to find!)

2. When I'm assigned a support ticket and the customers and partners have me on IM they can just ping me with the case number and ask for an update / provide more information. I reply instantly to confirm I got it, and then arrange a mutually convenient time to chase it up properly. This actually saves me lots of time - I can pull the case notes up prior to ringing the customer for example.

With PN's system I wonder if there's an option to ask the customer if they have a ticket number before sticking them in the IM queue - then, at PN's end, they can have their chat window link directly to the existing ticket.

It is (or should be) possible to ensure that the two systems are kept in sync, so when a different chat window is activated, the helpdesk system responds... so situations should never arise where the respondent is reading the support ticket for customer A while responding to customer B in the chat window or vice versa.

In which case it wouldn't matter if you had one chat window open, or five, or ten. I regularly have multiple MSN/Skype/Lync/Skype for Business/Slack/FB chat windows on the go, and provided you have a context link between the chat and the ticketing system (either manual or automated) it's not difficult to avoid confusion.

[#9]

problem is that PN support system does not work ! ,, and i presume the bean pushers upstairs do not care

all they bother about is what free offer next will increase our customer numbers 

[#10]

I've just had your 34 in the queue. Was not like this 4 years ago. Maybe the customers have increased. Ah well thanks to brexit it wont go over 34. Phew

[#11]

Same here. I cancelled the chat.

[#12]

Possibly that is what PN want customers to do   if everybody cancels the chat   NO queue   PN says LOOK our wait times have gone

[#13]

57 in the chat queue.  I waited.  I hoovered the sitting room, washed the kitchen floor, watered the plants, cleaned out a cupboard, by which time I was 12 in the queue.  I was then cut off.  Thank you Plusnet for a clean house, but that was not the point of clicking on Chat.

Started again at 9.05 in the evening.  Just after 10, was cut off.  Think I will try again when I have a full roast dinner to make, and by the time I have eaten it and washed up, I may be lower in the queue!

[#14]

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@tstaddon wrote:

Same here. I cancelled the chat.

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In post 29, tstaddon wrote: "Actually, I like the chat feature."

Do you still like it? (Cheeky grin !!)

Sorry, only kidding ! As Ali G would say, "Maximum respect!"

Although my fewer experiences have been less positive than yours, I do understand that you consider that properly implemented chat facilities can be both effective and useful.

But I think that the theme of this thread is that we are more than a little unhappy with the Plusnet version, and the apalling wait times.

With the sort of numbers mentioned here, and assuming an average wait time in excess of an hour, my limited mathematical skills suggest a collective waste of customers' time approaching something like two man-days on an ongoing basis !

I'm of an age where I might not have a lot of time left to waste, and I imagine that others value theirs too.

We might as well "bin the router and go and be an off-grid spoon whittler" or whatever the Plusnet advert says. Except that the Plusnet understanding of contract law appears to me to be that their breach of contract renders me liable to give them more money if I leave early.

Well, clearly, customer service response times are far from satisfactory, and although Plusnet have pointed to ongoing recruitment as the solution, -  we've heard it all before. I'm currently having a bad time helping some elderly friends with problems with their Plusnet Service, but things weren't any better a year ago when I tried to deal with problems with my own.

I am grateful that a member of Plusnet staff has popped into this thread a couple of times, but as other participants have requested, this needs to be escalated as a matter of priority, and I think that we deserve a response from a decision-maker.

[#15]

Never had a problem with it myself but maybe I've just been fortunate, but fortunate for the entire past six months?

If as the topic suggests (and I do not doubt it for one moment) that folks are having to wait in a long line in order to talk to somebody then it is not fit for purpose and plusnet need to address the issue pronto but the chances of that happening I do doubt as it is not in their interest - unless the churn rate goes above what they deem to be an acceptable level.

Shocking indeed.