Old user - frustrating web signup (lack of it!)

Hi all !

Fibre has eventually found its way to my estate (2 years after the exchange was upgraded!) - looking around, now that Plus.net have an unlimited (but more importantly non traffic priority product) I'm looking at potentially moving back.

However, it seems that if you have a plus.net account already, you can log into the member portal, but not upgrade it from PAYG back to a dsl or fibre product. The links are there, you can click on them, but you just go round in a circle always ending up at the help assistant page as soon as you select the package of your choice.

Called plus.net to work out if there is an issue, but seems no - I cannot use their web-site to upgrade myself I have to call sales during the week (sales don't work at 10:30pm on a Sunday night!)

Whilst certainly the member portal seems to have been developed somewhat in the 5 or so years I think I've been away, sadly the frustration of it not being able to do something that should be simple still remains I see.

Is this an omen for what is to come? Especially as I have to take an 18month contract.... Regretting it slightly already and not even managed to upgrade/sign up yet.

Hrrmm :/

Will try and call sales during the week and see what can be done.

I had this issue. PN are unable to upgrade old accounts to fibre. I had to create a new account and raise a ticket for PN to migrate my referrals to it. I also retained my old account as PAYG.

In reply to a post by NormanB:

I had this issue. PN are unable to upgrade old accounts to fibre. I had to create a new account and raise a ticket for PN to migrate my referrals to it. I also retained my old account as PAYG.

Seriously? That's crazy...

I too have referrals etc on this account, be a pain in the rear to have to manage two accounts.. pah.. was bad enough having to cope with 1 account when Plus.net web-mail servers got hacked and all the addresses stolen from them.. even now I still get spam from that breach.

Might carry on looking around, see what sky can offer me (seems they only do 40mb though - weird..)

Edited by deleted (Sun 02-Jun-13 22:58:05)

In reply to a post by Tam:

I too have referrals etc on this account, be a pain in the rear to have to manage two accounts.. pah.. was bad enough having to cope with 1 account when Plus.net web-mail servers got hacked and all the addresses stolen from them.. even now I still get spam from that breach.

An my referrals are now on my new account. The only management required on my old account is to collect the emails. Easy.

In reply to a post by Tam:

I too have referrals etc on this account, be a pain in the rear to have to manage two accounts.. pah.. was bad enough having to cope with 1 account when Plus.net web-mail servers got hacked and all the addresses stolen from them.. even now I still get spam from that breach.

Might carry on looking around, see what sky can offer me (seems they only do 40mb though - weird..)

LMAO
Sky do have 80/20 ...
.
.
.
You can't order it online, you have to ring up! "Seriously? That's crazy."

Re two accounts - as has been said, you can transfer the referrals. And ever since you left, you've been managing two .

Ok, well I took the risk, seems I need to just create a new account and leave the old one running beside it..

Have signed up for 80Mb fibre and to switch my line rental to them.....

4 hours later - ticket ref:70295703 pops through

Welcome to plus.net - here's your new phone number .........

ERRRRR... NO!


Called support - seems someone has followed the wrong process and ordered me a new phone line instead of a transfer ......


Poor start ... It's gotta get better hasn't it?

Hi Tam,

Both sorry and feeling a bit let down my self about the problems you've had there. I assume from what I can tell that the issue with the transfer of a number is on it's way to being resolved but let me know if any more assistance is needed with that.

With regards to your referrals I can move those across from the old account to the new one for you, I'll just need to wait for the new account to become active first.

Likewise please let me know if you have any other concerns.

Adam

In reply to a post by thatadamwalker:

Hi Tam,

Both sorry and feeling a bit let down my self about the problems you've had there. I assume from what I can tell that the issue with the transfer of a number is on it's way to being resolved but let me know if any more assistance is needed with that.

With regards to your referrals I can move those across from the old account to the new one for you, I'll just need to wait for the new account to become active first.

Likewise please let me know if you have any other concerns.

Adam

Might as well keep the old account to be honest, if this doesn't go well might not need my new account

It now looks like my order is delayed while we wait for a cancel to complete on the wrong order, before a order can be issued again for the correct product.... not great strart for a speedy switch over I'm sure you'll agree.

Yep that's not great, sorry about that. Feedback will be passed on about that. Just let me know if there's anything further you need help with.

Adam

Yes..... Place the damn order !

Its now delayed for another day due to waiting for a cancel.. so that's PlusNet delaying the order by 3 days now.

On top of that o2 have just text me to tell me my phone line is to be cancelled....W.T.F. is going on at plus.net towers!

Can you fix it?

Edited by deleted (Tue 04-Jun-13 12:16:57)

Ok,

So ended up calling support again to see whats going on.

Lady says the BT cancellation has been cancelled so i should not loose my number / phone line (I'll not hold my breath) Further more, the actual Fibre order hasn't been placed (no idea why!) so she'll place it now and i'll get an email and text confirmation.

5 mins later ....

E-mail:
As per our conversation, your fibre order has now been placed and I have provisionally booked the appointment for 11/06/2013 between 1 PM and 6 PM. If you need to change this appointment time please let us know with at least 2 working days notice by calling 0800 432 0200 or replying to the online ticket.

1 min later
Text message:
Your fibre appointment has been provisionally booked for 13/06/2013 between 1pm and 6pm. If you need to change this appointment ... yada yada yada...


Seriously !!??!! ..... Just knew this was going to be a mistake moving back to plus.net...

Hi Tam,

Really sorry about that. I've raised it with the agent concerned and she's said she'll correct it for you now.

Thanks Matt, Wednesdays are best, Thursday PM if needed otherwise... (That is what I've said in the tickets all the way along.. )


Cheers

In reply to a post by orbrey:

Hi Tam,

Really sorry about that. I've raised it with the agent concerned and she's said she'll correct it for you now.

And you are quite correct, she did indeed update my ticket as follows:
Confirmed your appointment is booked for the 13/06/2013 between 1Pm and 6PM

Excellent,

10 Mins later - your router is being shipeed to you

Excellent.


This morning:
Your broadband service is due to be active by midnight on 14/06/2013



Do plusnet have any testers who quality control this god awful process to check it actually works?? - or are we all your guinea pigs to see if it works or not?

Really really terrible system you still have if each and every ticket appears to have a different date on it,

What do i believe, the CS rep with the 13/06/2013 or the SMS confirmation for 14/06/2013?

It simply means that the eng will come on the 13th PM and your service will be up-and-running and billable from 12:01 AM on the 14th, at the latest. So you don't get charged for most of the day of installation when you don't have the service. Most ISPs do this.

Hi Tam,

Your broadband will be active on the 13th.

In reply to a post by Tam:

What do i believe, the CS rep with the 13/06/2013 or the SMS confirmation for 14/06/2013?

As I think has been pointed out, the problem is that you have read "midnight on 14/06/2013" as being at the end of 14/06/2013 whereas it actually means the beginning. Either interpretation is possible but only one gives rise to an apparent discrepancy

In reply to a post by chrispurvey:

Your broadband will be active on the 13th.

And charged from the 14th inclusive?

Charged from the moment the account is activated, which as it's a Fibre account will be the 13th when the engineer visit is scheduled for - otherwise the user can't connect once the service is active.

So you charge by the minute? Or you charge for about 18 hours non-active time?

EDIT: Billing and using should be 2 separate activities.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Wed 05-Jun-13 13:28:13)

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Billing and using should be 2 separate activities.

Coo!

In reply to a post by kasg:

In reply to a post by Tam:

What do i believe, the CS rep with the 13/06/2013 or the SMS confirmation for 14/06/2013?

As I think has been pointed out, the problem is that you have read "midnight on 14/06/2013" as being at the end of 14/06/2013 whereas it actually means the beginning. Either interpretation is possible but only one gives rise to an apparent discrepancy

That's exactly it - I'm trying to view this from a non-techy non-TB reader... This is where many processes fail within companies as the people viewing/checking are so involved they know what is meant so don't view it properly.

As above, you can read the text either way, is that midnight on the end of the 14th or at the stroke on midnight just after the 13th.

For Plus.net to make it as easy as possible for users, this is what they need to - it'll will make the end users experience better and create less support calls to their phone lines / tickets.

I'm planning to continue to post the progress of this order just to see where else things can be improved.

To calibrate your understanding of the dates and times, just think of when the New Year Fireworks start up it is on the 1st of January at 00:00

In reply to a post by DRW:

To calibrate your understanding of the dates and times, just think of when the New Year Fireworks start up it is on the 1st of January at 00:00

I think you failed to grasp the point, as the fireworks go off, what do you call it? Me I'd call that Midnight on new years eve...

In Plusnet's terms they are calling it Midnight on the 01/01/2013

Without a time stamp its hard to know if that means 00:01 or 23:59

As I said, we activate it so that the service works as soon as the engineer leaves. At £19.99 a month the cost is pretty much 66p per day, I realise it's the principle of the thing but even if we were able to activate the account at the exact moment the engineer finished his work I'm not sure our billing system would handle a partial day's charge (though we do pro rata refunds/charges for services activated part way through the month).

All in all I'm not really sure what you're expecting us to do here?

I thought all ISPs charged for the full day of connection, other than in exceptional circumstances.

Sorry, I am not expecting you to do or change anything.

I was just asking a Q arising from your statement:

In reply to a post by orbrey:

Charged from the moment the account is activated

But I agree that either way it makes not much diff and is often swamped by the usual overlap of charging, by both ISPs, when migrating.

Having a similar problem viewing my useage: just brings up details on payment.

You ring up and can't get any sense out of the support staff and emails just bounce.

And indeed it is Chris

Had a PM appointment, last night got a call from the BT engineer, "can i come tomorrow morning" - Yes, Yes you can!

08:30 engineer arrived, by 09:30 he'd left and i'm racing along at 70ish Mb

Excellent !

I know someone who moved from BE to Plusnet recently (ADSL to ADSL). The LLU to BTw migration appeared to happen at around 8:00am, but PPPoA attempts failed until around 11:00pm - presumably that's when Plusnet activated the account.

That 15 hours downtime seemed entirely avoidable. Is that the norm?

time to change sig

The OP's connection is PPPoE. And no - downtime is usually a few minutes.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 13-Jun-13 14:30:59)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

The OP's connection is PPPoE. And no - downtime is usually a few minutes.

But technically the result of PPPoA could be the same. i.e. physical migration in the morning, authentication enabled in the evening.

Would be interesting to hear from someone at Plusnet how physical LLU migration and authentication activation is synchronised.

For Plus.net to make it as easy as possible for users, this is what they need to - it'll will make the end users experience better and create less support calls to their phone lines / tickets.

I'm planning to continue to post the progress of this order just to see where else things can be improved.

So yet another weird email appears from PlusNet... where is the quality control in their system design?

When you signed up for your broadband account, we performed a check on your telephone line to give you an estimated speed your line might achieve.

Now that your service has now been active for 14 days, we thought we'd let you know the speed as it stands today, by way of comparison.

Estimated line speed: 1Mbps
Current line speed: 78Mbps
You can keep a track of your line speed through our website:

blah blah blah etc.etc.

Now obviously the 1Mbps is my dsl expected speed, and the 78Mbps is my actual FTTC speed.

But why is it comparing two different technologies...? Surely it should be your estimated was 78, your actual is 78.... which is what was the case.....

And why are some emails just plain text and others nicely html formatted? Need some standardisation here me thinks.

Quality control at PlusNet as far as customer communications is concerned is still an issue at PlusNet it seems.

We're partway through a review of *all* the emails we send out! As you can imagine this is a huge undertaking, especially when some are HTML, some text and some a strange hybrid.

We're started with the early life emails, so through the sales, provisioning and first part of service and then we'll move on to in-life etc.

I'm hoping that within the next few months we'll start to see the nice new shiny templates going out with relevant and more useful information on.

Well if I may, I suggest a user page with lots of tick boxes for folk to select and de-select the different flavours of e-mails they can receive.

If your systems were really clever, you could give users the option to only get service e-mails for their postcode.

While if they were really, really clever, we could get e-mails telling us that our service is down.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

While if they were really, really clever, we could get e-mails telling us that our service is down.

Printed out and sent by a pigeon?

I would suggest it is about time you had telephathy sorted that way information could be provided directly - very old hat using emails and the likes...

Printing is a little high-tech. How about hand written? It also has a personal touch, which larger companies can fairly do with.

You're not thinking grandiose enough. I'm wondering if we should teach the pigeons to sing the message once they arrive, or at least play a fanfare on a small pigeon sized trumpet before they hand it over.

Ye Olde Yorkshire Pigeon (or YOYP to replace VOIP)?

A dastardly plot sir!

1) To a pigeon, a pigeon-sized trumpet would be quite large.

2) The system is flawed! Each pigeon released by PlusNet would need to believe it lived at the individual customer's premises.

3) My alternative system involves PlusNet having on-call pilots at regional airfields who would be deployed when necessary to sky-write the messages. The colours could be green for problem solved, amber for the maintenance warnings, and red for actual or forecast downtime.

Presumably using some sort of fluorescent smoke so it can be seen when messages have to be written during the hours of darkness.

That's done by moonlighting airline pilots.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

1) To a pigeon, a pigeon-sized trumpet would be quite large.

Ah yes, but I specified a *small* pigeon-sized trumpet. I guess though to be strictly correct I should have specified a trumpet appropriately sized for a pigeon.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

2) The system is flawed! Each pigeon released by PlusNet would need to believe it lived at the individual customer's premises.

I took it as read that a pigeon intelligent enough to either sing a message or play a small trumpet (with a beak and no lips!) would be able to navigate to a given address and back again

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

3) My alternative system involves PlusNet having on-call pilots at regional airfields who would be deployed when necessary to sky-write the messages. The colours could be green for problem solved, amber for the maintenance warnings, and red for actual or forecast downtime.

I like it, but it's less Yorkshire and more Lincolnshire. If we're going for something like that I'd rather get some kind of laser and project service status messages onto the moon.

I should probably stop this before it becomes apparent just how strange I actually am...

In reply to a post by orbrey:

I should probably stop this before it becomes apparent just how strange I actually am...

Far.....too.....late.

A superb come-back. I particularly like the bit about intelligent pigeons.