You really are a prime example of Classical conditioning.

You'll forgive me if I remain sceptical about the whole thing.

So you can pay extra and still sit there waiting up to half an hour to speak to someone? Where do I sign up!

Erm well yes, until Zen get the additional support people up to speed.

But if it needs passing to BT you will get a quicker reply from them. I don't see what's wrong with that to be honest?

Er yeah, but as they've clarified (and I know from experience), the main issue is normally within BT - e.g. Zen then pass it to BT, and it sits there for *ages*.

So to be honest, waiting 30 minutes for Zen, while not ideal (but seemingly temporary), it's still nothing compared to *days* waiting for BT to do anything...

You don't see anything wrong with BT needing to be bunged extra money to do their job? Just proves what a scam they operate. When I was with BTYahoo, I always got extremely rapid responses to problems. So obviously they do give preferential treatment to their own customers (and don't give me any of that old bilge about the ISP and engineering section being two separate companies).

Not when it's what you've signed up to no, rightly or wrongly as you know standard ADSL doesn't come with any sort of SLA, this simply offers customers the chance to pay for one (or at least a guaranteed response or whatever it is).

The reason a lot of business still go down the leased line route is because with a leased line you're paying for a guaranteed service level too.

Best analogy I can think of, at work I buy HP servers. I already pay a premium over, say, Dell. If it breaks they'll come and fix it the next day as standard. If it's important to me I pay them for a support pack and 4 hours later the engineer turns up, I have the choice, it all depends how critical I consider that server to be to the business.

Could I ask, would you prefer that everybody's ADSL cost

Edited by hutchingsp (Sun 22-Oct-06 10:07:52)

I have to agree with you. I left BT Yahoo in January because of the appalling standard of offshore support. However, between April 2002 and December 2005, four faults were raised with Wholesale and dealt with swiftly. I also had calls from Wholesale to discuss the issues in question and follow-ups when things were sorted. Zen

what i don't understand is if zen raise a fault with BT its normally resolved within 1 day anyway!

Er no I don't. They're offering a "priority" service. This undoubtedly costs them more.

For example, if your line fails at 10pm, and I want to get it fixed, changes are the only engineers available are on-call, and thus cost more, and overtime etc. It would be unfeasible to do this for everyone as standard, so I don't see tha a premium charge is "unreasonable" at all.

In the same way, our customers can pay extra to contact an engineer 24/7, but it costs them more (double and then some) which those who really want and/or need such a service will willingly pay for.

No no, I don't see any problem with it.