Free PlusNet

A couple of friends have recently told me about their experiences with PlusNet, they've both used the isp for quite a while, but decided to leave, one because he was moving house, one because he wanted a different supplier. After ringing up and getting their mac codes from PlusNet, they later recieved a phone call asking why they where leaving, and whether they would reconsider. One friend who was going to change supplier told them so, and they offered him a free month, which he took.... they paid the money into his account a few days later. My other friend obviously said no when asked if he wanted a free month, because he didn't see the point, then they offered him another and another, so 3 months free on offer, and a free router!!

Seems to me that anyone can ring up and say they want to leave, then get the 3 months cost paid into their account and then leave anyway, because they have the mac code already! Or even if you don't want to leave you can have 3 free months on PlusNet!! woo!!

Just spreading the good will ~x

My friend was told he could have a free month or MAC code but not both.
He took the MAC and says (unscientifically) that he's noticed web pages are more responsive now.

It's funny how ISP's (not only Plusnet) decline to give refunds or free months to customers who have suffered a loss of service. Yet are happy to do so to retain customers. Perhaps if the former was addressed, the latter would be unnecessary

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It's funny how ISP's (not only Plusnet) decline to give refunds or free months to customers who have suffered a loss of service.

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Although PN did give a month's refund to affected BB+ customers recently after the problems earlier in the year.

Amen, Brother. But PlusNet have never volunteered a refund to anyone AFAIK... and I guess that by doing things this way round they limit the damage, ie they don't have to give refunds to those who have suffered but stayed.

Perhaps the new Ofcom regs are starting to hurt the ISPs who had accumulated a large pool of unhappy but semi-captive customers.

Simon

Does the refund offer to BB+ customer not count? I suppose you can counter that by saying it wasn't "volunteered" but I would have to disagree, they could have done nothing and lived with it. They messed up and the month's refund was a volunteered to limit the damage.

or are you saying to your knowledge, even with that offer, that no one has ever got a refund from plusnet because they didn't post about it on here or do you have access to internal information from plusnet that has told you there have been no refunds...........

edit : a bit more added

Edited by paul2002 (Fri 04-May-07 07:37:31)

My view of the BB+ refunds is that they were penny-pinching, damage-limitation, token affairs which were intentionally difficult to get, poorly publicised and restricted to the few even though the entire BB+ platform was apparently malfunctioning at far below contracted levels of service.

However it was a qualified refund but it wasn't a voluntary PlusNet initiative. It came after much dissent in the forums, loud demands for compensation and, no doubt, the realisation by PN lawyers that they would have to pay out anyway if any customer demanded a refund through the courts.

PN's attitude to refunds was never better illustrated than by the blatant ripping-off of customers who subscribed early to the vaporware offer of the 4/8MB "queue-jump" products. Only PN know how many customers fell for this, paying a totally unnecessay monthly premium for up to a year and receiving absolutely nothing in return. Under pressure, they did agree to a refund but they then changed their mind before giving anyone their money back.

I think that their policy on refunds has been disgraceful. No doubt someone will tell me about worse examples in ISP-land but that would merely mean that they were tarred with the same brush.

Simon

Hi there,

We do operate a retentions scheme (as do many companies), and in some cases a free period of service may be offered. However this is not offered to everyone who calls us up asking for a MAC code.

We try to contact customers to find out the reason why they are leaving, and try to address that from there. The idea behind the free month offer is to either give us time to resolve the customers issue, or to prove that our services have improved without costing the customer money.

BTW I hope your friend enjoys his free month and decides to stay.

Hi,

The reason behind this is the fact that BT Wholesale do not offer us refunds for periods of downtime, broadband is not a guaranteed service and we still pay for the circuit throughout the fault process.

For most people the amount would be very small anyway, if you had no service for a week on a

I have to disagree, it was still voluntary on the part of Plusnet. Yes damage limitation and you may be right that it might have ended in the courts, but the offer wasn't forced as a result of a legal action either privately or from ofcom. They could have sat back and done nothing and lived with the damage, bad PR, loss of customers etc

We will just have to agree to disagree on this point. I suppose we are getting into semantics again.

There are better isp and worse ones............Plusnet aren't the best but I don't think they are at the bottom of the pile either.

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My view of the BB+ refunds is that they were penny-pinching, damage-limitation, token affairs which were intentionally difficult to get, poorly publicised and restricted to the few

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I have no idea how many BB+ refunds were given, how it was publicised etc I'm not a BB+ customer..... I know you say its your view but what is that based on..... your feel or responses from BB+ customers?

>Although PN did give a month's refund to affected BB+ customers recently after the problems earlier in the year.

That isn't correct.
They gave a refund to some affected customers.

We do operate a retentions scheme (as do many companies), and in some cases a free period of service may be offered. However this is not offered to everyone who calls us up asking for a MAC code.
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How do you choose which customers to offer this to?

Simon

Your arrangement with BTw isn't relevant to your customers or their rights. If it should transpire that a customer is entitled to a refund because of a BT fault, it is your prerogative to pursue BTw for compensation, having already paid out to the customer. The notion that BB isn't a guaranteed service is a non-starter. If someone pays you money for a service, they are entitled to get it back if you can't provide the service - whether due to an internal fault/policy or to a problem with one of your suppliers.
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For most people the amount would be very small anyway, if you had no service for a week on a

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The reason behind this is the fact that BT Wholesale do not offer us refunds for periods of downtime, broadband is not a guaranteed service and we still pay for the circuit throughout the fault process.

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The above statement isn't quite accurate though:
http://www.bt.com/terms/pdfs/bt321c.pdf

In all honesty, I wouldn't expect PN to refund for a day or even three for problems, it is the nature of the technology, but I would expect an ISP to refund for 7 continuous days of problems (because of the SLA above), as well as for prolonged but intermittent technical problems.

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Does the refund offer to BB+ customer not count?

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According to Ian, PN refunded 1019 customers on BB+, that is from a total of 76,000 approx that were affected (some would have noticed but not others). The only people to be aware of the refund were extremely limited: those that visit the forum, have signed up for service status email updates and/or those that PN contacted.

Edited by rsharma (Fri 04-May-07 10:46:56)

Can you name any provider who gives a refund for a short period of loss of service where no SLA is force ?

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The notion that BB isn't a guaranteed service is a non-starter. If someone pays you money for a service, they are entitled to get it back if you can't provide the service - whether due to an internal fault/policy or to a problem with one of your suppliers.

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They are only entitled to get their money back if the level of service received is less than the level of service paid for. Most UK broadband service providers back-off the details of the service they buy from BTW in their contracts with their end-users - ie you're paying for a service that should work, but is not guaranteed to. That's the main reason that the Leased Line market is still limping along ...

As long as PlusNet are taking reasonable endeavours to resolve a fault then a customer isn't entitled to receive anything back. You seem to be confusing legal obligations with good customer service ...

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For most people the amount would be very small anyway, if you had no service for a week on a

>I don't think a

Hi,

It is entirely dependent on the problem the customer has experienced. In many cases we can resolve the issues that the customer has had and no refund is necessary, and in a few cases no amount of free service is going to make a customer stay.

We look at each cancellation ticket seperately, and decide what we can and can't offer the customer accordingly.

>As long as PlusNet are taking reasonable endeavours to resolve a fault then a customer isn't entitled to receive anything back.

What period could be considered reasonable in which the fault should be resolved?

What are considered reasonable endeavours?

Could it be as long as 30 days because the ISP and BT claim to have taken reasonable endeavours to fix the problem and can it be even longer and still be acceptable? How much time is too much before the ISP becomes liable to pay for a faulty or non-existent service? For instance, could an ISP claim after 14 days of no service that the customer wasn't entitled to a refund?

I believe that 2-5 days without service is acceptable, as long as the ISP handles the fault diligently, and doesn't delay it due to poor customer service or a lack of staff, any longer and the SLA issue won't even come into play as the customer would rightly demand and be entitled to a refund IMO.

However, we are discussing an issue which applies across the industry and not just PN (although some ISPs are better than others in that regard). We are also discussing an issue in the wider context because no one in this thread is claiming such a refund and being denied one, therefore I see little point in debating it further for now.

Edited by rsharma (Fri 04-May-07 11:25:30)

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It's not the point if a customer is going to stay or not. If a customer in entitled to a refund, then it should be given.

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I quite agree. However the rest of my post that you didn't quote was talking about refunds not being something that customers were necessarily entitled to - but merely good customer service....

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Herein lies the problem.

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In all honesty, I wouldn't expect PN to refund for a day or even three for problems, it is the nature of the technology, but I would expect an ISP to refund for 7 continuous days of problems (because of the SLA above), as well as for prolonged but intermittent technical problems.

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Hi,

In the majority of cases if a fault has been ongoing for more than a week we will apply a refund if requested. By default we don't apply refunds for broadband faults, but we will look at each case individually.

Bear in mind we also offer free dialup for the duration of any broadband faults to mitigate both the cost and inconvenience to the customer in the case of any problems.

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What period could be considered reasonable in which the fault should be resolved?

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Good question. The simple answer is that in terms of their contractual obligations I have no idea - a court precedent would probably be required and I can't see that happening any time soon over a

Didn't want to take your post out of context, but you divided your replies to Simon.
It maked it look like they were different issues.

Hi,

I think I can sum up the feelings in this thread quite well.

The problem isn't one about offering customers free months in order to persuade them to stay, we all know that it is good customer service to try and retain a customer if they are leaving due to technical problems and because it is more economical to do than try and sign up new customers. No, the problem arises from the fact that PN have traditionally not offered refunds for technical faults (and even in cases where they should have done e.g. the

I didn't mean to imply that every short-term problem warrants a refund -- but persistent and/or continuous problems for 5 days or more, if the fault of PN or their suppliers, should qualify for an _automatic_ refund and that you could improve your corporate image no end by enshrining this into a well-publicised policy. It should not be a "goodwill exercise" but an entitlement.

I can assure you that if an outside agent cause the loss of all comms in/out of your buildings for a fortnight, you would rightly be demanding full compensation - and may rightly be insulted to have it termed a "goodwill exercise" to imply that it was not your fair and full entitlement.

Simon

And which ISPs currently provide these refunds? for lack of service/connection when BT are at fault?

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How do you choose which customers to offer this to?

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I believe it is based upon bandwidth consumption. After four years with Plusnet I was offered no free month, I was probably considered a medium/heavy user.

Obviously only more profitable customers are offered this free month, it is offered not to benefit the customer but to try and benefit Plusnet in the long run.

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And which ISPs currently provide these refunds? for lack of service/connection when BT are at fault?

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I do not know of any, but some good ISP's do offer SLA's on residential ADSL rather than a refund upon request as a 'goodwill gesture' for outages which are the fault of the ISP:

http://www.newnet.co.uk/terms/#slg

Thanks for that - newnet seem to have some good aspects. any others (excluding premium / surcharged ) services?

Why not go and ask them if you're interested? Or better still, perhaps their customers or forum regulars could ask them? I'm happy to discuss PlusNet with you if you wish.

Simon

I've not fully read the full T&C but the ones for Newnets SLG seem to exclude any BT issues as they cover only hardware operated by the company.

you could of course discuss PN with me Simon, but your qualification to do so is getting a little dated... More homework required methinks... whats Zens position on this issue?

They do exclude BT faults, but if you read the post I replied to and my reply, I did already state that as such.

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I do not know of any, but some good ISP's do offer SLA's on residential ADSL rather than a refund upon request as a 'goodwill gesture' for outages which are the fault of the ISP:

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>http://www.newnet.co.uk/terms/#slg

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Taken from the page you link to:

This warranty excludes:
failures of network/equipment/circuits not operated by the Company;
failures of circuits external to the Company's premises.

So that won't cover them in the case of a BT fault then, or an exchange issue, or any one of a multitude of things? Basically that reads as they will refund (5%) for any loss of connectivity for more than 1 percent of the month if it is caused by them, unless you pay for platinum cover.

We are looking at offering things like enhanced care for business users which will speed up the resolution of faults, and could look at this for home users if the demand supports it.

Edit: Sorry, typed this before Vince et al replied. Points still valid though.

Edited by deleted (Fri 04-May-07 12:52:44)

you could of course discuss PN with me Simon, but your qualification to do so is getting a little dated... More homework required methinks...
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Sorry about that Paddy. Could you just remind me what qualifications this forum requires?
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whats Zens position on this issue?
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Their policy is also wrong - as I have pointed out - but in their case it's an academic discussion since I'm not aware of anyone wanting to claim any such refund. Having been with Zen for over a year, I haven't seen any evidence of prolonged faults, unacceptable traffic management, loss of email or platform malfunction.

Simon

>Sorry about that Paddy. Could you just remind me what qualifications this forum requires?

Maybe some thinks it's membership to PUG?

Hi there,

I've spent a lot of time with the retentions team recently and can assure you the decision to make a retention offer is certainly not on bandwidth consumption, unless you were using hundreds of GB's per month, in that case you would not be profitable paying for a service, so we probably wouldn't be too enthusiastic giving it to you for free!

The current process has only been in place for a couple of months, so if it was before then the decision may have been made on different criteria.

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Basically that reads as they will refund (5%) for any loss of connectivity for more than 1 percent of the month if it is caused by them...

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That reads like 5% is the maximum for outages over 1%, that is not the case. The longer the outage, the hgher the refund, up to a maximum 35% below 75% connectivity.

This is a contractual obligation, nevermind what a judge would consider reasonable expectation of service provision for any outage over 25% if compensation was persued in court.

Either way, it is a huge improvement on Plusnet's SLA which is non-existent, after all why would a customer quibble over a few pounds anyway?

<OT'ish:I recently contacted Trading Standards over an issue involving an overcharge of

Edited by deleted (Fri 04-May-07 14:00:24)

Hi,

The Plus refunds were voluntary on our part. Obviously there was feedback from customers before that but the decision was made as an acceptance that the product hadn't performed as it should have

The whole 4/8MB arguement has been done to death so I'll leave that one, there's nothing I can add to that discussion and it's in the past. All we can do is demonstrate that things are different now, and our new products reflect those differences IMO, as they are very clear and concise and set the customer's expectation correctly. We've also emailed customers to let them know about the new products so there can be no confusion there.

We also refunded customers who had problems when we moved them to LLU, and regularly credit users who have extended faults or provisioning issues.

I agree to an extent, as I said in my post it's the principle that counts from a customer point of view (certainly from the feedback I have received from customers anyway).

However, an SLA like that would not be worth much to an end user, as the vast majority of connectivity issues affecting one individual user would be related to a line/exchange problem, so therefore no refund would be applied.

If an ISP suffers a problem which affects connectivity to their network it is more than likely going to affect many users, and would be fixed within a very short timescale, so again no refund would be applied.

Anyway, I don't work for Newnet, so I'll get back to some PN discussion before I get in trouble for going waaaay off topic.

I migrated November 2006, I was using on average 50GB per month Premier Option 1.

The general concensus at that time was the decision to offer a free month was based on past 3 months usage.

Yep, usage would have been taken into consideration at that point. This is not the case now though, retentions offers are made purely on the basis of the reason the customer wants to leave, and only where it's relevant to the issue.

Actually there is one thread at the moment in the Zen forum of a long standing issue. The why's/wherefore's are of course the other issue.

Anyhow, as It happens I've had a couple of faults over the last few years, inevitable with the length of service held and the number of active lines held. I've had a refund in a couple of cases but as with Plusnet it is a discretionary thing. To be honest, that sounds similar to my mobile contract too - I don't recall them guaranteeing refunds if I lose my service (which on Orange I did some years back for 22 days). I had to fight for a refund.

>I've had a refund in a couple of cases but as with Plusnet it is a discretionary thing.

Or so the company claim, doesn't mean they are right.

It is quite amusing when a company authorises a refund or compensation claiming it to be a goodwill gesture when it is anything but (they usually know they are obliged to give a refund). It doesn't matter what the company claim the legal aspect to be, they can't be trusted to do things to protect the customer's rights (the opposite is often true). In most cases for a refund it is only when a formal complaint is filed, escalated further through external means or a threat to take their custom elsewhere do they pay back the money.

In addition to the terms of the contract, the supplier's relationship with the customer is governed by the Sale and Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 and Sale of Goods Act 1979. The contract itself is subject to The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 (as amended) & The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. The rest is largely irrelevant.

>I had to fight for a refund.

The fact that you still remember it speaks volumes. How would you regard them today had they paid out without having to fight for it or even ask for it? If a company is going to relent in the end they might as well pay quickly thereby keeping the customer happy (in turn he will speak highly of the company to others) and save themselves costs by avoiding handling an escalated complaint. Instead, many companies fail to do that and often argue contrary to the consumer's rights as protected under legislation.

Edited by rsharma (Sat 05-May-07 07:36:15)

Simon's comment was.......
But PlusNet have never volunteered a refund to anyone which seems to me to be untrue.
I agree the refund numbers versus the BB+ customers is not great.......another challenge for them to communicate better.