Plus Net implodes

gideonsquared · 21st July 2006

Hey all

Any plus net customers on here noticed the crazyness that seems to be going on at the moment.

I think when you are attacking your ex customers and some of the current ones you have a real problem with your company. It may well be time to move on for me I think.

http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...=&view=&sb=&o=

Si

philb · 21st July 2006

Sadly I can see the guys point of view - but plusnet have brought the status quo on themselves.

The 'access' industry is a joke these days, as a result of the larger providers in the industry trying to cut their own arms off in order to reduce the monthly cost by 50p and making unrealistic service promises a mindset has been instilled in the general population that net access is supposed to be absolutely dirt cheap (or "free"! Thanks TalkTalk/Orange/Sky). This is all very well and certainly there is no harm in competition, but when prices drop to the lowest levels there are going to be sacrifices made. Getting upset when the service quality on a dirt cheap product fails to meet your expectations is akin to getting a Lada on HP and then complaining bitterly and openly to anyone who will listen that it's not a Lexus. Well, duh.

If you want to complain about a service that you're purchasing not meeting a certain standard you perceive to be necessary for the product to be of use to you be sure you're actually paying enough to receive that quality of service in the first place. If you're not happy with your cheap as chips ISP not providing "acceptable" service, suck it up and move on.

What the PlusNet guy is so miffed about (and rightly so) is that there are a lot of posts all made by the same handful of overly vocal individuals (and each ISP on ADSLGuide has it's own small group of hardcore whiners) who really should have something better to do with their time (or should change ISP, if they're actually a plusnet customer to begin with). Whether or not storming onto an industry forum and posting the bare faced truth is advisable remains to be seen (though it's never done us any significant harm so far, other than to scare off customers I perhaps never wanted to deal with in the first place!)

chrisbyrd · 21st July 2006

Dear Chris Byrd,

You have played a direct part in PlusNet’s success by recommending us to others. It’s through the support and trust of people like you that we have enjoyed the rapid growth we have experienced in recent years. You are a very valued customer.

In the past few months some customers have experienced a variety of issues with their service. It may well be that you haven’t, so if this is the first you’ve heard then I’ll briefly bring you up to speed. There have been some service issues with the BT 8Mb MAX upgrade programme that have caused some customers problems. Inconsistent with the experience of the trial, and due to systems issues at BT, a large number of faults were raised and as a consequence we experienced backlogs in our support centre. These are now clearing down and will be gone by the end of this weekend.

We also recently suffered power service issues causing network disruption and recently an email service issue which was entirely avoidable and due to human error.

As employees and of course users of our services, we’re painfully aware of the above issues which, if they occurred too frequently, would inevitably lead to you questioning your ability to recommend PlusNet to new customers. It’s all too easy to conclude from all this that we may not have been providing the quality of service that we once were.

What are we doing about it? We have tackled BT in relation to the 8Mb MAX upgrade programme and have delivered fixes to the systems and process issues. We will be restarting the 8Mb MAX upgrade programme in the coming weeks. The fact that we suspended the upgrade programme meant that we stopped adding to our backlog of service issues in the support centre and allowed us to focus on clearing it down.

We’re making sure that should you not be able to get what you need online you can get in touch with a knowledgeable and properly skilled support analyst. To that end we have restructured the support centre resulting in the average quality of the analysts increasing. We are taking on board customer feedback and restructuring parts of our support journeys online, like the Help Assistant and how you find the content that will help you.

PlusNet remains the ISP it always was, everyone here cares deeply about our customers, and we are working hard to fix stuff whilst at the same time developing our platform and products further. We have staff who work round the clock because they want to make things better for the people they see as important – the customers. Not because we make them.

We want you to judge us by our actions and not just our words. You have been one of the foundations of our success and we know we have let you down. Historically service disruption has always been there, but not in the same frequency as the last two or three months. As regards the experience that some customers have had in that period, we are truly sorry. We are determined that this will not go on for any longer and we will make things better.

You may have already come across the PlusNet UserGroup. If not you can find them at http://usergroup.plus.net. This is an excellent way to see more of what’s happening and of driving feedback to us. The Usergroup members are all customers of PlusNet plc, working in a volunteer capacity on behalf of other PlusNet plc customers.

Yours truly,

Alistair Wyse
Technical Director

PlusNet Customer Support

[inx]Olly · 21st July 2006

THIS USER HAS BEEN GAGGED BY THE FORUM HOSTS FOR SPAM OR BREAKING THE RULES...
User will be ungaged in around 78 hours from this post.

thermaldegree · 21st July 2006

Quote:

But if I want to see hard working members of PlusNet staff, who are just trying to help, being personally attacked and vilified, then I will come straight here.

I think this is his main point and a perfectly good one; the rest however is totally off-base and not very wise in my opinion :/

AdamC · 21st July 2006

Re: chris's post - the subject of the e-mail he has copied is We have let you down - just thought I'd post that

BurtyB · 22nd July 2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by philb

What the PlusNet guy is so miffed about (and rightly so) is that there are a lot of posts all made by the same handful of overly vocal individuals (and each ISP on ADSLGuide has it's own small group of hardcore whiners) who really should have something better to do with their time (or should change ISP, if they're actually a plusnet customer to begin with).

Why do you say rightly so? IMO if they have paid for a service they should expect to get it and be un-happy if they don't. In my experience large ISPs don't care for the little man with his problems .. Its a joke when big companies like NTL and Telewest have problems with their support process resulting in a loss of half of the information you send them! I get frustrated myself with this and rightly so... but can't complain because half of the information gets lost every time via the "email" forms so they have no idea what I'm going on about..... and don't get me started about phone support they cant even understand a postcode never mind the concept of packet loss....

ChrisB.

philb · 22nd July 2006

They (and perhaps you) are buying from an organisation that isn't geared to adequately support the service quality that you want (be it a temporary or permanent status quo). Does your broadband connection actually come with an SLA with respect to latency and loss? Yes, you may have reasonable expectations of service quality but if you find you have an issue your provider is either sufficiently clueless to not be able to troubleshoot or they're just not interested in fixing then wasting hours bitching about it is a genuine waste of time - don't whine and bitch about it for the rest of eternity instead of simply doing yourself a favour and going elsewhere. Once you're gone you need to move on with your life not carry on popping in to needlessly lambast and whine about your old provider.

The vast majority of noise is the same handful of people needlessly bleating on about the same issue they were having half an hour ago, and a sizeable proportion of the rest is from ex-customers or people who've never been a customer. Not only that, but as soon as a member of staff from the hapless organisation turns up and responds to the posts they put themselves at risk of being vilified as some sort of criminal who's directly responsible for the problems people are experiencing. THOSE posts are what he's objecting to, and I fully support him in his objection (though perhaps not the manner in which he voiced it

) - this is a seperate issue from any real or perceived issues that plusnet have or havent failed to address.

gideonsquared · 27th July 2006

I'm tired of people using the "you get what you pay for argument." I'm paying £29.99 a month for my ADSL connection, I don't consider that dirt cheap by any stretch of the imagination. £12.99 a month is cheap for an ADSL connection. Why am I not entitled to expect a reasonable level of service? (note I said reasonable and not SLA)

Anyway I think the problem that +Net is having is more to do with them not realising why people are un-happy. You can't post long drawn out rants attacking ex and current customers for telling the truth. The purpose of ADSL guide is to allow the customer to judge how people feel about an ISP. Posting a rabid diatribe like marco's and then threatening to sue someone for there sig doesn't strike me as the way a PROFESSIONAL company should be run, especially not one that is loosing customers fast already.

My only other point is that I'm utterly tired of the "cap in hands" routine. They seem to honestly believe that saying things like "We let you down..." will instantly win people back over and everyone will feel sorry for them. Sympathy is something I reserve for my friends and not people who provide a professional service to me.

philb · 27th July 2006

As I said as part of my posts, if you don't think you're getting your money's worth, vote with your feet.

gideonsquared · 27th July 2006

That's exactly what I'm doing

WebMate · 7th August 2006

PlusNet's customer service has been NON-EXISTANT during the past 15 days. Right now I'm listening to the stupid onhold tune of the customer phone line and the automated message said their current waiting time is in excess of ONE HOUR.

I have paid for my connection and was told it would be ready within 10 days, but so far they have ignored all my support tickets and there is NO way to contact them.

I'm not actually a new customer of PlusNet. I've been using them for over three years and recommended them to many of my friends, but I'm now going to get my MAC code (if I can).

I'd be still loyal to them despite all the issues, but whey they CHOOSE to ignore me and refuse to respond to my queries, there is not much to hope for.

I hope all of you who're having similar problems, can finally get out of this mess.

weycrest · 12th August 2006

Plus Net brings back some memories ;o) I remember being booted off by +Net for being a "heavy" Surftime user back in 2000/2001 so I have little sympathy for them. Switched to Demon and never looked back. I think the posting by the +Net's Marketing Director was ill advised to say the least.

Paul
www.weycrest.co.uk

AdamC · 12th August 2006

I havn't had any problems with plusnet yet other than a couple of heavy usage messages saying I've nearly reached my limit but I have lots of referrals so it doesn't cost that much so I doubt I'll move anywhere unless it get any more serious.