How do you elevate a complaint at Plusnet?

I've just had an American/Canadian support operator refuse to elevate my complaint because he "isn't losing his job for me."

That's the second support operator to tell me that in the last 8 weeks. This one insisted I go through the process with him, and wouldn't listen to me pointing out that the router is at my parents house 20 miles away, Then he hung up on me bcause I insisted I would not go through first line support for the 10th time and instructed him to get somebody to call me back tomorrow.

What on earth has happened at Plusnet? They never used to be this bad.

They want me to go back into the queue after 8 weeks, 5 engineers and a worse problem than when this all started.

The last engineer but one assured my elderly parents that the problem was outside of the property, and wrote it down for them to give to me; a HR fault (underlined for emphasis) between the pole and the master in his opinion, and most likely due to water ingress.

He told us the drop wire would need replacing, but he wasn't equipped to climb the pole. Engineers returned a couple of days later with a bucket lift, tested the line, said it was fine, rang me and said "we can't fix what ain't broke mate."

The noise is so bad on the line you can barely hear the caller on the other end. The guy that just hung up on me, says the router is showing that all it needs is rebooting. I would tell my mum, but I can't hear her for all the noise on the line.....

What on earth does it take to get through to somebody that is prepared to listen?

Have you tried the Community Forums? That's where the good reps are. Occasionally one of them pops in here as well but who knows when?

Have you tried their community? https://community.plus.net/

There are a few ways on here:
https://www.plus.net/help/legal/complaints-code-of-p...

I agree that the forum has the best support staff, and the best route to getting a problem solved.

When I had to raise a complaint, I pointed out how hard it was to keep explaining a complicated issue to different support staff, and demanded support from one member of staff to keep track of progress.

As it happened, one of the forum staff had taken the issue on while the complaint worked its way through the system. Things still took a long time to sort out, but I lost the aggro of re-explaining things time and again.

As it happened, one of the forum staff had taken the issue on while the complaint worked its way through the system. Things still took a long time to sort out, but I lost the aggro of re-explaining things time and again.

This is exactly what is so infuriating.

It's not Plusnet's fault, as OR simply aren't doing their job, but I'm fed of being the go between. It's a paid service and they need to take ownership of the problem, but some of the support guys' idea of customer service is flabbergasting.

Listen first, talk second - training concluded.

It is Plusnet's fault that you have to explain the problem repeatedly. What you have reported and what has been done and failed should be on the customer file.

British Gas engineers can tell me several year's history of my heating installation in great detail. Openreach on the other hand don't seem to give their engineer's any history at all. Plusnet should be like BG, not OR.

Thank you for the link. I've posted there now.

Forget the internet aspects of the problem. You have a statutory right to a clear voice line. So raise the issue with the company you are getting the landline from. Get the voice problem solved and then most likely the broadband problem will be solved.

Both Plusnet. Still no closer.

Jokers.

So after being persuaded to let them send another engineer out instead of raising an official complaint, we have now (yesterday) had another engineer's visit. He has advised quite clearly that "BT" need to be forced to sort the issue, as he believes it is definitely the line and is not broadband related. This seems to align with what you have advised.

So before I had a chance to call plusnet today, as I pay them the line rental, I received a text message.

Plusnet: I firstly apologise for the issues with your service. As no fault could be found on the engineer visit, please try an alternative router and monitor the connection again or call us on 0800 432 0200 to discuss getting a router from ourselves.

So I called them.

After five engineers visits (two with a truck ready to renew the drop wire) and two who were prepared to write down what type of fault they had found on the line, the intermittency has again lead to it being signed off as "no fault found"

After confirming that they cannot help with third party routers, I was advised that I would have to buy one from them as it was out of warranty. I refused and said I would simply raise a formal complaint instead. He was quite keen that I didn't do that and told me he would ring back after he had spoken to a manager, and hopefully get the router replace FOC, bearing in mind the fault has been going on since mid April.

The manager did in fact very kindly offer to replace the router FOC......if we were prepared to sign up for another 18 months.

You couldn't make this stuff up, and I certainly won't be put off any longer from making a formal complaint.

In the end a formal complaint is just another part of the process. The question is do you think this will help. If so proceed. If not then its a case of do you move or not.

I am at a total loss why you have reported a fault with the broadband.

This is a clear voice fault. Report it as a voice fault. Explain the line is so unclear you cannot use the landline. Fault fix times on the voice side are quicker as well.

No need to keep reporting the broadband, the broadband is problematic because of the fault on the voice side.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

I am at a total loss why you have reported a fault with the broadband.

I haven't. I've reported a very noisy line that improves dramatically when you disconnect the router, and drops whenever the telephone rings. With all due respect, I pay them to do the technical diagnosis. I can only advise on the symptoms.

This is a clear voice fault.Report it as a voice fault. Explain the line is so unclear you cannot use the landline. Fault fix times on the voice side are quicker as well.

They have been told this repeatedly. As mentioned in my previous post that you may have missed, I have been hung up on twice by Plusnet operators for refusing to talk anymore about the broadband, and insisting on talking to the faults team directly. It's seemingly impossible. Both operators left tickets saying "Customer refused to go through tests and was rude when told that the faults team couldn't call him back."

Apparently not believing that the company that supplies your telephone line isn't allowed to make outgoing calls, is being rude.

No need to keep reporting the broadband, the broadband is problematic because of the fault on the voice side.

As I said, if they stop talking when they should be listening, they might realise that.

A quick check, have you tried in the test socket using a different filter? Could just be a faulty MK filter if you have a pre-filtered socket.

If line is bad when using test socket and no broadband hardware at all is connected, then no point in changing broadband hardware, its a pure voice fault.

HR faults usually start by mucking up broadband, and once bad impacting on voice and once visible on voice only generally a lot easier to get things fixed.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If line is bad when using test socket and no broadband hardware at all is connected, then no point in changing broadband hardware, its a pure voice fault.

HR faults usually start by mucking up broadband, and once bad impacting on voice and once visible on voice only generally a lot easier to get things fixed.

not always the case, If you have FTTC and the fault is on the E'side it wouldn't really impact the FTTC service

But voice faults can be elusive they have a habit of being intermittent ie you can pick up the handset and be greeted with lots of crackling over the dial tone ,this can fizzle out within 30secs, line tests may or may not detect the issue, then if your phone rings this can also clear the fault for several days , Unless a voice engineer actually hears it themselves they are unlikely to be able to find it, unless they have EXFO or JDSU test equipment with them, so could end up costing the customer a whopping £130+

Edited by tommy45 (Wed 22-Jun-16 14:48:28)

It might be a case of moving the telephone line to begin with. I really don't believe that Plusnet can solve the issue; it would appear OR are simply working to rule.

Plusnet are undeniably hamstrung by their own procedures. Streamlined to deal with minor issues, but as soon as the external infrastructure comes into question......Groundhog Day.

It really is perhaps time to email somebody high up: [email protected] is the CEO and should get your complaint upto the executive complaints team.

Email along the lines of:

1) You have had significant fuzzing and noise on the landline resulting in a poor, entirely unusable landline. This has been the case for months and PlusNet still have done nothing to resolve it.
2) To date plusnet have refused to send out a voice engineer, despite the landline being unusable. You have begged and pleaded and spent hours onto CS.
3) The broadband also does not work well, with drop outs and slow speeds, a broadband engineer has visited however they are unable to resolve.
4) You have to date spent significant time and effort on this.

Make it clear, this represents a formal complaint, which if not dealt with and fixed within 8 weeks as set out by the ombudsman (CISAS), will result in you seeking ADR and ombudsman involvement. Inform Plusnet they are welcome to set out a letter of deadlock, which will be forwarded to ombudsman as their final stance, if they choose to not take up the complaint.

I highly doubt the ISP will ignore your issues if you raise it up to the executive level. Also the ombudsman and ADR is expensive for the ISP, so it is in the ISPs interest to resolve your issues once the threat of their involvement is brought up. It seems you are getting nowhere with standard CS so I thought I would provide some higher up info.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 23-Jun-16 00:41:52)

Reading your posts, this sounds very similar to the problems I was having back in 2012 when the broadband would cause crackling on the line, but it never seemed to happen/be nearly as bad with the broadband disconnected. One of the things that we found constant was the ability to hear the modem 'talking' to the DSLAM when syncing up (Robotic sound on the line). If this applies to you, it will make things much easier since you can show this to the engineer when he's on-site.

We only managed to get the problem diagnosed by communicating with the UK forums team at BT who sent out multiple engineers.

Unfortunately in this modern day and age, you get some (Select few) engineers at Openreach that are near useless. These few 'engineers' won't be proactive, will not deviate from their way of doing things and will do as little work as possible, even if it means feeding rubbish to the end user. Due to the way the industry is regulated (Lack of in some respects), a lot of the time you rely on chance as to whether you'll get a good engineer and/or an engineer with the right equipment.

It took us multiple engineers to get our line sorted in the end and the problem was only diagnosed when we got an engineer with the correct equipment (PSTN Engineer) for tracing the problem which turned out to be a [censored] 'tee' joint connection that was a 'direct burial'.
In our case, I found myself constantly having to relay information told to me by the engineers to the support team at BT because Openreach were not capable of communicating issues between engineers internally and every time we took one step forwards, we had to take a step back.

At the end of the day it all boils down to the fact your contract is with PlusNet. You really need to get into contact with someone there whether it be on the PlusNet forums (Not sure if they have a dedicated support team like BT) or on the customer service team there.

One thing I would say; try and get into contact with a support team that uses email! This makes it a lot easier to communicate issues.

As I'm sure you're aware since you've already stated this, you need to push this as being purely a voice fault. I've found that PSTN engineers are typically better equipped than Broadband engineers at Openreach, so they will be more likely to find the issue and you're more likely to get one for a voice fault. When they do, talk to the engineer to find out what's going on. To be safe I would tell PlusNet immediately what the engineer has told you in-case the message isn't passed along within Openreach (Quite frequent from my experience). That way they can chase OR for a resolution.

Hopefully someone on here has information on a written support team within PlusNet?

Sorry for rambling on but I wanted to get everything down in-case any of this is at all useful for you.

Did you get nowhere with the Community Forum reps? This doesn't sound like them at all. More like the semi-defunct ticket system or first-line support on the chat line.

Not a bean.

Thanks for the advice. I'll ponder it, but have honestly had a gut full at the moment. They really are no different to any of the other ISP's, whatever they claim.

Thanks Chris, appreciated. But as my reply to hardy, I just can't be bothered with it right now.

I've referred people to them in the recent past. I won't refer any more I can promise you that. I've told them what to expect, so as not to blame me if they have to put up with similar nonsense. They're looking about as they're out of contract now.