Poor Response Time When Raising A Ticket!!

[#1]

Anyone else find the length of time it takes to get a response when raising a ticket is very poor?  I'm finding that its taking 16hours plus to get a response when I'm advised the average wait is about 5-6 hours. 

[#2]

sometimes it depends on the nature of the question e.g. if it requires a specialist teams response.

[#3]

How come you can get an answer straight away if you phone?  Is it different staff ?

[#4]

Not as far as I know...

[#5]

TBH I don't mind the wait so much, as long as it means that the person that answers, actually knows the answer and can help.
Thats the way of PN olde.
I can't vouch for the same quality of service these days though, I think the honest answer is the PN seem to follow a policy of being just better than the competition, rather than always doing their best.
This is not a reflection really on the staff, who have always tried their best IMO. I do feel though that the staff are not as well trained as they used to be - a sad reality of progress and success.

[#6]

Indeed. I rarely think the ticket system's worth bothering with any more; responses often seem to take longer than the current average response time indicates, and the replies are rarely of much use (stock replies, ugh). Which is why I always raise non-urgent queries/problems on the forums these days (not that I have many). Having said that I've found the staff to be quite good when I've phoned them on the very odd occasion I've needed to.

[#7]

My experience of using the ticket system generally reflects the experiences here - it's been poor.
Fortunately - I found the community almost as son as I joined - so I raise a ticket and mention it here - and then I generally get a good response - but even if someone like James deals with it - I still get silly responses to the ticket from other people ?.

[#8]

I'm semi-glad you feel similarly as an old-timer!
I wish we had access to an ISP of similar standards to those of the PN Mr S et al aspired to (and created to an extent) in days of auld.
However, comparative to the rest of the BB market,I think we used to pay more of a premium comparative to the rest of the market than we do these days.
Its not really a criticism, since business does as it has to in order to survive, but I do wish I could recommend PN with passion I used to be able to.

[#9]

I too have been around for a long time - coming up to seven years soon - although I must admit my memories of PN's support quality back then are quite vague... not sure I really used support much all those years ago, perhaps because not much really went wrong (unlike now, for example, when virtually every month something goes wrong with my billing...).

[#10]

Sorry T, my comment really was directed to you in the context of the thread, although I thought it generic enough to leave vague.
(you may not have realised that I also took time to read *all* of your posts in the ML (formerly SL and TL) too)
/I guess you might try to recall what you might have written all those years ago that you now cannot access. (just as I do on occasion!)

[#11]

I do indeed - I not infrequently wish I could look back and see what I wrote, particularly because I felt like I spent more of my time in the 'lounges' than in the actual public sides of the forum. If I tell SMF to show my post history, over 20% of my posts are unreachable! Which makes it all the more crazy to think that you went through reading every single one of those posts...

[#12]

I used to read every single post made to this board (and before that every single post made to the PN board, and the F9 board too)
These days I don't have the time (one of the main reasons I stepped down from modding - it used to bug me that I didn't read everything, no matter how unrealistic it sounds as a proposition.)
[me=James_G]also read/reads just about every post on the PUG boards too...[/me]

[#13]

At about 2 a day in the open bit - not too big a chore 
Now reading every post on this forum - I am out for a day and suddenly 2 or 3 pages of unread posts sheeesh 

[#14]

Earlier this evening I was reading a message I posted back in December 2005 when I resigned from PUG which seemed not totally irrelevant to this topic. Here's part of what I had to say back then

Quote

About Plusnet When Ian Wild set PUG up Plusnet was different from the other ISPs. They seemed to be trying and for the most part succeeding in providing a breadth of services which you only got from more expensive ISPs or from specialist hosting providers. Their prices were very good, not the very cheapest but certainly very close to that. The self help community spirit among the users was very strong and this was part of the reason why providing the advanced facilities worked. It was this that made me pleased to be part of a usergroup to hopefully build upon that excellent foundation. The main reason why the community spirit was so strong I believe was the openness and honesty of PN which induced a high degree of loyalty amongst the PN users. That has long gone, a succession of terrible changes, or perfectly good changes handled in a very poor way has completely soured relationships such that the proportion of critical postings in all the public forums (portal forums, Usenet, AG and other places) is appalling. It's going to be a long, long time before the damage done is repaired. Will PN ever get back to being the ISP is was? I don't think so - mainly because they do not want to. PN was enjoying a good steady growth - mainly because of their reputation. But it wasn't spectacular. Now there are shareholders and growth in the number of users is very high. The whole business plan seems orientated towards continuing this explosive growth and it's all to obvious that the company infrastructure isn't there to handle it - even PN are acknowledging that the support standards have slipped and they are having to draft in extra staff to cope. So what happens - at a time when they are struggling, they take over another ISP with all the implications that has for demands on the time of their best people. We know Stew isn't going to be around much - who else is going to be similarly diverted? Kitz and I have both argued for some time that PN do not have the BT centrals capacity to meet the contention ratios in the specifications of the products. I have absolutely no problem with the way PN are moving on the management of the network. However what we have is a highly managed, prioritised service NOT a contended service. But the products are to this day being sold with a very high emphasis on the contention and little if any information about Gold, Silver, and Bronze and the implications visible to new users before they sign up. That is for me a major part of the dishonesty I now see in PN's user relations. All my arguments about this in the PUG forums have been batted aside (and not just by PN) - I'm afraid it seems just a waste of effort. I actually believe that the main reason why more segments have not been activated is not because they were not needed, but because they needed to build up cash reserves ASAP to enable them to make acquisitions. I don't believe they will stop at Metronet and that investment in the network for the PN users will continue to be as little as they can get away with. For a long time PUG members have worked beside PN, trying to help inform users about what was happening. The main time we did that was early this year with the FUP proposal. We did it because we knew it was basically a good idea. I not sure that there has been much recently that PUG members would be happy to advocate on PN's behalf.

[#15]

Quote from: Minxymoo

Anyone else find the length of time it takes to get a response when raising a ticket is very poor?  I'm finding that its taking 16hours plus to get a response when I'm advised the average wait is about 5-6 hours.

It often depends on what the query is about, tickets are directed to certain teams based on the subject and which bit of the Help Assistant they're raised from.