Plusnet Community Support

Over the years, I've contacted one of the PN Community staff members to deal with problems or ask questions. It's far less painful than raising a ticket, and things get resolved very quickly (same day).

Last week I contacted my usual favourite chap, and one of his colleagues answered, the two subsequent follow ups have been dealt with by further different people too.

It's fine, and my issue is resolved (billing, what else !) but is this a change of policy ?

The change of policy is that you can't raise tickets for anything now, (apart from a few obscure things) and online chat has been stopped. Calling can be a long long wait so many users are seeking help in the forum. They claim to offer support on social media but I am not going there. Forum support has been very slow during the lockdowns but looks to be improving, it often depends on the staff manning the forum, one or two are very good, others maybe need more training

I believe that if you address a problem or reply to a member of the support staff directly i.e. @name in the post, then the notification goes into a pool of open queries as opposed to going only to that person.

Gets around the possibility of the addressee being on holiday, off sick etc.

Umm. I've only really stayed with Plusnet until now, because I've had good quality support via this back door. Given that things will soon get complicated as PSTN switchover gets nearer, and the fact that my internet connection is getting more and more important (for work and leisure) I think I'll be migrating to Zen or IdNET when my PN contract expires next year.

I don’t normally post here. Actually I think this is my first post but the community forums are something that’s close to my heart so I thought I’d drop a reply. In no way though am I offering ‘support’ here as I’m not in the office.

Historically PMs used to go to that person and that person alone which presents a problem as said above that if they’re off shift then the PM goes unanswered for x amount of days until they’re back in.

PMs now go through a centralised queuing system (as well as the usual way natively on the forums) like public posts that are fed into a tightly knit team of 4 people. Names are on the forum rules here https://community.plus.net/t5/Community-Announcement... (I’m Gandalf)

We also work as part of our social media team on Twitter/Facebook so you may see some other people from the wider team make an appearance on the community forums occasionally but it’s mostly handled by us 4.

Sorry to see you’re looking at leaving because of this. If you’ve had your issue resolved, do you mind me probing for more reasons for you going elsewhere? Genuinely interested to try to make the forums the best they can be.

In reply to a post by Anoush:

I don’t normally post here. Actually I think this is my first post but the community forums are something that’s close to my heart so I thought I’d drop a reply. In no way though am I offering ‘support’ here as I’m not in the office.

Historically PMs used to go to that person and that person alone which presents a problem as said above that if they’re off shift then the PM goes unanswered for x amount of days until they’re back in.

PMs now go through a centralised queuing system (as well as the usual way natively on the forums) like public posts that are fed into a tightly knit team of 4 people. Names are on the forum rules here https://community.plus.net/t5/Community-Announcement... (I’m Gandalf)

We also work as part of our social media team on Twitter/Facebook so you may see some other people from the wider team make an appearance on the community forums occasionally but it’s mostly handled by us 4.

Sorry to see you’re looking at leaving because of this. If you’ve had your issue resolved, do you mind me probing for more reasons for you going elsewhere? Genuinely interested to try to make the forums the best they can be.

Hi Anoush.
Thank you for taking the time to raise your head above the parapet !

I'm actually very happy with the technical quality and reliability of my connection. The only problem I have had in 10 years was a BT Openreach issue, (where they were performing work on my cabinet) and thanks to an exchange of PMs with my PN community contact, it was resolved very quickly, and established there was no fault on my actual line etc. If it had been another mass market ISP, I'd have had to have jumped through lots of scripted box ticking hoops, etc etc. I've also moved house twice in that period, and my service (and phone number) have seamlessly moved too without any glitches.

What is a looming problem is Plusnet's flaky billing portal that often crashes (at least for me), and sometimes it's difficult to work out with all the pro-rata debits and credits what is going on. PlusNet's continued lack of FTTP support might become an issue (at some point)

You get what you pay for with an ISP, and thanks to the community support mechanism, I have been getting a very high level of support beyond what you'd reasonably expect. My issue last week was indeed resolved just as effectively as usual, and you reassure me that it's still a little sub-group of just four of you. That's good.

Please send a message upstairs though about the billing, and the continued silence regarding FTTP, before 2025, I'd like to port away my phone number to a VoIP supplier, and I'd like that to be possible with PN

May I join @broadbandjockey in thanking Anoush for explaining the Plusnet forum setup? I’m amazed that only four people are providing such effective backup for 1.4 million customers. It must be a thankless job at times and perhaps even more trying during lockdown when so many people have been working and living 24 hrs in their apartment.

I have employed other providers back to dialup days and based on these I’m happy with Plusnet backup, and very happy with its value for money. My experience is shared by at least a dozen older people in our community group, for whom I have sought service help in the past.

Perhaps because the BB service is technically good many forum users forget that Plusnet is a mass market provider and provides basic equipment such as the Hub One router. Its ‘extras’ such as its clunky email are as useless as any other ISP so I use independent suppliers but even if one in three customers require better features that leaves almost a million people who are satisfied with their service.

My BB/phone service has been excellent over many years, but Plusnet’s billing system has not. Every contract change/renewal has been screwed up resulting in long phone calls and extra work for the support staff. I’m with BBJ in asking for this to be passed up the line as it’s my only criticism of Plusnet with which I have no connection whatever other than a satisfied customer.

My best wishes and thanks to Anoush and his patient, hard-working colleagues.

Hello, sorry for the delay, I don’t often check these forums and I hadn’t quite worked out email notifications…

Cheers all for the kind words and the feedback.

If you’re happy with sharing publicly, do you mind me asking who your community mystery contact is? I’d love to make sure they get some recognition!

I'll jump in here too - I have a Plusnet VDSL circuit and feel that the service is excellent for the price.

When getting the new line up and running there was a lot of back and forth but I was pleasantly suprised to speak to friendly humans who understood the technology, didn't insist on pointless script-following and were more than happy to keep raising faults with Openreach until a decent copper pair was found.

Some background: the BTw prediction for the address was 56-72 with a handback threshold around 52. Plusnet guaranteed 47.5. Even after three visits when the line started to achieve 57Mbit, Plusnet called me to say they didn't think that was good enough, and sent Openreach back until it reached 67.

By comparison, A&A said nothing more could be done (same address, same line predictions) after one engineer visit and a 51Mbit sync.

Apart from getting some IPs routed (where else would you get a block of IPv4 included at a mass-market price?) there has been no further need to contact support as the service has just worked.

My contract has the best part of a year left to run, at which point my exchange will have gone fibre-priority. If Plusnet offer a sensible FTTP migration option I'll be more than happy to stay.

In reply to a post by Anoush:

Hello, sorry for the delay, I don’t often check these forums and I hadn’t quite worked out email notifications…

Cheers all for the kind words and the feedback.

If you’re happy with sharing publicly, do you mind me asking who your community mystery contact is? I’d love to make sure they get some recognition!

That's an easy one, it's you Anoush !

Haha amazing. And here I was thinking who on my team could you be referring to, not once did I stop and consider that person could be me (Although I did had a small inkling)

Happy to help any way I can. I’ll go and give myself some recognition.

I have to say that all (with one exception) cs agents that I have had dealings with over the years have been helpful, knowledgeable, good humoured and most importantly understandable.

On that one occasion I rang off and then rang back later. They all do a good job and I've never had a problem getting things escalated when necessary.

I've got a problem line/connection but that's down to the age and distance and I constantly marvel at the speeds I now manage to get.

I hope you are better than the phone support and sales I have had to deal with.

Lies, failure to take an available FTTC slot ... and then told FTTC not available on the cabinet!

In reply to a post by Anoush:

Haha amazing. And here I was thinking who on my team could you be referring to, not once did I stop and consider that person could be me (Although I did had a small inkling)

Happy to help any way I can. I’ll go and give myself some recognition.

But beware.

A few years ago there were three or four really good support people on the Community forums, and fairly frequently a couple of them would also come here to help.

After a year or so a ban on them posting in this forum other than to refer people back to official channels was imposed by your employers. Followed by what appears to have been a complete ban.

The quality of the support provided on the community forums also went down a bit later, as part of the gradual deterioration of Plusnet support in general.

It may have improved since, I don't know, but only phone and tickets seemed to work for a while, then even tickets were de-prioritised. So I left.

The only areas that were reasonably easy to access appeared to be Accounts and Retentions.