What's gone wrong with Plusnet's Customer Service?

[Berberis 10]

Plusnet used to have terrible customer service. I know, I worked there. They also had terrible data protection. I could see every customer's credit card details in plain view. Plusnet had a server that held a huge chunk of its customer database. It was insecure but management didn't care. It was hacked and this is the reason why plusnet customers suffered from large amounts of spam. Plusnet kept it quiet and the news didn't get out.

 

I'm sure they are different now, but back then, they were terrible. I suspect its no different if you have ever worked in the food industry. If you see what goes on out of view of the customer, you will think twice about eating in a place you know everything about.

[truman 10]

 

I`m not sure, but is that relevant anyway ? Are you implying that if a company provides a lower price product they should be expected to provide crap customer service ? What I would say is it`s relatively rare we phone up PlusNet, so, to provide decent (faster response) customer service isn`t actually going to cost them that much anyway.......

 

How do you work out that giving faster response doesn't cost much?

[L00b 441]

I've never had bad service from PlusNet, and I've been with them for years. I've had a couple of bandwidth issues over time, but as usual it was hard to pinpoint precisely where the issue was (PlusNet gear or BT infrastructure), which eventually self-resolved.

 

That said, I recently had a narky exchange with them, after one of their customer service types rang me on a speculative call to see if a better/cheaper package/solution could be explored, and who then informed me that he couldn't, because there was an outstanding P&P charge of £5.something on my account since...

 

...2009

 

When they'd never once even mentioned it to me (so it's Statute-barred...IIRC it was a replacement router for a faulty one, or subsequent to a package upgrade) and I've been paying them in full, monthly, on the dot by DD since 2008. I s**t you not

 

I was not impressed and, when the poor guy asked that I contact customer services to resolve, needless to say I requested (politely) that PlusNet customer service looks into the matter first, and then rings me instead. Haven't had a call back since

Edited May 3, 2016 by L00b

[Womerry2 10]

My connection went down last week. I called, got through very quickly, the problem was resolved immediately, and they called back the next morning to check everything was still working well. I think that is just about perfect customer service. And very good value!

[walkerx 10]

I never had issues with their CS when I was with Force9, but its the same with any company providing support you get good consultants and bad ones. The problem is if you tend to get the bad ones every time, you resort to not calling them.

 

A lot of companies also make the staff follow a script instead of allowing them to use their own initiative in helping the customer resolve a problem they may be experiencing.

[Larry1966 10]

Plusnet used to have terrible customer service. I know, I worked there. They also had terrible data protection. I could see every customer's credit card details in plain view. Plusnet had a server that held a huge chunk of its customer database. It was insecure but management didn't care. It was hacked and this is the reason why plusnet customers suffered from large amounts of spam. Plusnet kept it quiet and the news didn't get out.

 

I'm sure they are different now, but back then, they were terrible. I suspect its no different if you have ever worked in the food industry. If you see what goes on out of view of the customer, you will think twice about eating in a place you know everything about.

Crikey. How long ago was that?

[Skink 10]

no issues with PlusNet here, used live chat previously and found it worked just fine

 

now if you want bad customer service try TalkTalk, my m-i-l tried to move her contract from them after endless unsorted issues and they were positively abusive

[ShefStealth 10]

Plusnet has always traditionally been a 'self-support' style ISP which is one of the reasons why it can be cheaper. It strives to place the customer in control of most things that they'd want to do with their account including moving home (They introduced the 'house move' tool within the member center in 2006, when I was working there prior to the BT takeover.) They have always preferred you request any support via raising a question/ticket on your account within the member center/'contact us'. Phone support is mainly there for issues of line faults/connectivity issues that mean you can't access support via the website.

 

It has never been possible for Customer Services to view full Credit Card details in 'Workplace' (The proprietary Plusnet unified administration software that's built in-house) I can't advise if the Finance department have access to those details, but figure that they should do in order to be able to process any disputes with card merchants/banks and negate certain possibilities of fraud. CSC has the ability to take customer's card details over the phone, or Direct Debits, but once these details have been added to an account then Customer Service agents can only see the last few digits of a card number, or a DD mandate number.

 

In 2005/2006 Plusnet was going through a massive period of turmoil after procuring and merging the clients of Metronet in a short space of time as BT Wholesale/Openreach were also uplifting all broadband lines to IPStreamMax (dynamic line profiling) rather than older static-speed products which caused a massive industry wide escalation of connectivity faults/customer disatisfaction. They also had a developer accidentally delete 700GB of customers' email data, and the old Webmail platform was found to have a major irreparable security hole (I believe they used to use squirrelmail as a back end, but I could be wrong on that). They were operating between two seperate offices at one stage, with CSC/Networks/Finance in one building owned at Victoria Quays and the rest of the company operating out of the Insight building at Attercliffe. This made certain operations more difficult, especially at a time when the Attercliffe offices suffered a massive power outage and the whole broadband platform fell-over, it took 8 hours to initially reboot it to basic systems and a full 3 days to get everything working correctly again at the time. The RADIUS servers (ISP side broadband authentication server) went down, alongside the main Workplace servers and as a lot of data on live-connections was in memory and not written back to disk before the servers went down, a lot of corruption took place. After all this, in mid 2006 there was a reallocation of the workforce and an approximately 30% reduction in headcount at customer services. Phone wait times at one point during this period were in excess of 3 hours. It was shortly after this time that Plusnet was bought out by BT group.

 

Since then, Plusnet has had 2 office moves, first to Tenter Street then to the current Sheffield offices location within the Balance Building. They've also expanded by opening another set of offices within Leeds. The mentality that there then should be more resillience by not having a single point of failure if one of the offices goes down, the drawback is bought back by that working over multiple sites is always going to be more difficult.

 

I can't speak for them now though since I left before the BT takeover, but even though they were a small company and had their issues, they weren't awful to work for so long as you had a good knowledge and attitude to customers. I figure certain things will have improved since the BT takeover whilst other things inherent to the industry are bound to have remained an issue that you'll get with any ISP.

[Justin Smith 10]

How do you work out that giving faster response doesn't cost much?

 

I mean relative to how much it`s used by any particular customer.

I wouldn`t even consider giving crap customer service in my own business no matter how much money I saved. I think it`s insulting your customers and I have more respect for them than that. Not only are they paying me but they`re almost all decent folk who don`t deserve to be treated like that.

 

---------- Post added 11-05-2016 at 12:13 ----------

 

I`m waiting on the soddin` phone for them, yet again. "A wait of 15 minutes is due yo high all volumes". What they`re actually doing is wasting all our time. How would hey feel if we all sent them a bill for our time ? £20 an hour seems very reasonable to me.