Hi

In reply to:

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yep as per IW's Pm tonite

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So Ian is again asking for questions again! Would you please tell Ian to stop asking us questions, and instead sort out the support mess that he told us would be sorted out many weeks ago. Lets break the cycle of: PlusNet apologies, we want to do better, what are your concerns and questions.....Okay so our support isn't good enough, we know this, major changes are underway and things will change in the coming months.....PlusNet apologies for recent poor service, we want to be better, help us be better what are you questions and concerns.......

It's the same old tired pattern of PlusNet trying to look as though they are doing something to sort out the mess but in reality they are doing nothing.

Maybe you could ask Ian for some solid metrics on how PlusNet have improved since the last round of questions and 'apologies and things WILL change' spin? If his answer is these changes take time and he has no measure of improvement, then perhaps he should get on and speed things up rather than waste more time gathering the same concerns and problems we have now that we had several months ago. To ask someone as a go between because the children at PlusNet will not post in this forum is confirmation of how childish they are!

Soundsystem, you are just wasting your time.

The option exists at sign-up, for customers to pay the setup costs upfront, rather than defer them, and the "smallprint" is all there, so I accept that there's a responsibility on the part of the customer to read it.

From a consumer perspective though, I see from an article at Zdnet, that Marco Potesta is quoted to be arguing against "mis-selling on free" and stating "there's no such thing as free"; whilst at the same time, Plusnet is selling setup as "FREE", which quite clearly has a price attached to it, and is actually "deferred".

As I see it, Plusnet are using the same technique of

They're still allowed on here to post in the Metronet forum though.

In reply to:

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Maybe you could ask Ian for some solid metrics on how PlusNet have improved....

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The most compelling evidence I see at the moment, aside from the level of dissatisfaction being expressed by customers in forums, is that following a "big push" on the Bank Holiday weekend, average closure of questions/tickets has fallen back , from 12 hours, 1 minute, to its current state of 19 hours, 27 minutes, which in reality translates to much longer delays for some customers.

Hi,

I have to say that I am rapidly coming to the point where I may well be moving from Plusnet, which I really don't want to do as it's going to cost me a lot of time and effort. I have three separate accounts with them for various addresses, another one I manage for my Mum & Dad and two domains they look after for me.

I've not been upgraded to 8Mb on any of the accounts, I don't seem to suffer loss of service at all, but my biggest gripes are:

They seem totally unable to deal with anything that isn't straight forward. I had cause to swap over two account connections during the summer, and ended up losing one connection for over a week. Which I wouldn't have minded had it not been for the fact that I tried to raise a call to get the whole matter dealt with in one go, only to be told to raise separate home moves calls on each account. The ticketing system never updated me that there was a problem on one of the calls, and when I finally got through to a human being to find out what had gone wrong, I got told that they could have done the swap dymanically! Argh!

The complexity of the call system to get through to somebody to talk to is depressing.

The webmail system. I have to use this a lot during the day, and due to the setup at work, my IP address is france based so I have to enter a security code before I can email anything. Reading the code is nigh on impossible, and I usually have to have three of four go's. Also, you can't use the encryption part of it, they aren't up to date with the latest version, and it repeatedly keeps setting emails back to unread so when I do get home to use Outlook I end up with multiple copies of stuff. (I need to retain some online for reference) Don't get me totally wrong, I like most it though. (I thought I'd add that in case they replace it with something that fixes these problems, but loses the other functionality.)

Most importantly I think the worse thing is that don't seem to care anymore. Most replies I get tend to say that that is way it is, and they won't escalate it to somebody to look at as an enhancement or fix. They say they care, but don't put systms in to show that they do.

Apologies for banging on, I kind of got into the flow of that to easily. I hope the examples show what I mean though.

Cheers

>>I find it a totally ridiculous state of affairs that Ian Wild is pm`ing you, to ask you, to ask if there are any questions people would like to ask him. Its ludicrous.

You are spot on. It reminds me of playground behaviour. "My mate fancies you but they can't tell you themselves so they got me to do it...". This is not the way to run a business. Not a professional one anyway. This is not aimed at IW necessarily since his hands seem to be tied but the fool(s) who actually made the decision not to post here.

I can only agree. Surely IW already knows what all the issues/complaints are? If he doesn't, then PlusNet is even more seriously mismanaged than I thought.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he knows full well what the issues are, what could be the purpose of a poll to find out what they are?

It can only be another playing-for-time exercise - as in Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Simon

I'm not a PN customer either (though I was once), but maybe IW could PM me too? (j/k)

Edited by deleted (Fri 22-Sep-06 09:44:32)

I have to agree - When customers are struggling to get tickets answered and problems solved it does seem daft to devote so much time on answering questions for non customers.

Plusnet's communication strategy as a whole is flawed, in my opinion.

In the past few months they've generated publicity as a consequence of "trading blows" and/or attacking critics, suppliers and competitors, often with un business- like language.

I would have thought, that as they don't mass-advertise, their reputation is an important part of attracting new business.

I think that a good number of potential customers would find Plusnet's capacity for generating arguments, an unattractive characteristic of a business that they would consider doing business with.

If potental customers perceive Plusnet to be argumentative, why would they want to enter in to a contract with them, when there are other suppliers with strong reputations for "doing the right thing" by their customers?

The root of Plusnet's communication difficulties though, in my opinion, is that they haven't had a high quality service of their own in recent months, on which they could concentrate their communications. The amount of time and effort they've put in to criticising other parties at the same time, gives a poor impression of themselves to potential customers, in my opinion.

Edited by cos1 (Fri 22-Sep-06 10:17:27)