Hi there Spooooky,
I'm sorry to hear of your experience, and you do raise some good points. The fact of the matter is that we are still in the very early stages of the webchat, and it is still a trial (hence the lack of full announcement).
The plan is to introduce a lot more webchat functionality in the coming months. I'd like to think that we will soon have a Customer Options Team facility. As you can imagine, this will involve either quite a lot of multiskilling, or taking resource from the Customer Options Team. Before anyone panics, it's likely to be the former, rather than the latter.
In terms of taking payment, I'd hope that we will be introducing this as well. I'm not sure whether we are in the process of implementing this yet, but I'd imagine that this will require us to run our plans past the ICO to ensure that we are compliant with data protection.
Whilst this may seem like passing the buck at the moment, I can only really stress that the webchat is still in a trial phase.
If there is anything I can do specifically for you Spooooky, then please let me know and I'll arrange for someone to call you.
Matty
ex-Plusnet staffer. Any posts after 28/07/2017 aren't on behalf of Plusnet