Zen support clogged?

For some time now I've been trying to contact Zen support by e-mail on a fairly serious matter, without much luck. The last time I emailed support was on October 30th, and I got an automatic acknowledgement; this at least assuages my worry that I'd fallen foul of spam filters. It's now November 8th, and I've yet to receive any kind of acknowledgement from a human despite the "Typical response times to emails are up to 24 hours on weekdays at present." in the automatic response.

Is anybody else having this kind of experience with Zen support? What gives? This has been going on for several weeks now, and I'm seriously unimpressed. I've been with Zen for over 5 years now, and they used to be extremely top notch when it came to customer service. Moving from loyal to disillusioned customer

It's because they are concentrating solely on FTTC now with little regard to anything else. Every time I've asked about new services (for example Annex M), I get told "FTTC !!"

Yes you might have expected them to be able to manage more than one thing at a time but more and more it seems not.

Or could be they won another round of awards, PCPro and Which I think, which has sent more customers their way?

I managed to get through on the phone just now and it was a 2 min wait from customer service representative to be passed through to tech support who resolved the issue. Haven't tried emailing though.

I left Zen mid last year. Not cause of any issues just cause i could get a better service for a better price elsewhere. One thing i noticed with Zen when i was with them is very often they were very slow replying to emails. There very quick and helpful if you phone tho. I would suggest just giving them a phone about this issue instead of waiting for them to reply to the email.

Blackmesa8

Ah someone else who has asked for Annex M. I asked some time ago and was told FTTC was being rolled out. None of the lines I want Annex M for have a date for FTTC so time they looked after their other customers.

I don't see what one (FTTC) has to do with the other (Annex M), UNLESS they're short of staff and that seems to be born out by other people's experience.

I have sent a PM for more information to allow me to chase this issue.

Hi,

Annex M offers increased upload, FTTC also offers increased upload - FTTC will therefore superceed Annex M in the future so we've chosen to go with FTTC as the service to provide increased upload capacity going forward (and, because of how FTTC works it will do so consistently, compared to Annex M's limitations).

FTTC doesn't make any difference to customer-facing team's staff availability and I suspect something unusual has happened in the OP's case - which it looks like Leo (Azzaka) is now investigating.

ta,
Phil.

What about the majority of your customers who can't get FTTC? Something doesn't ring true here. It's a bit like an ISP suddenly saying we've decided to go with ADSL2+ over ADSL because it's better - again, great for those customers who can get it but what about the rest?

In all honesty Zen have been incredibly reliable, both in terms of service availability and consistent speeds so it will take a lot for us to move away from you, but our exchange has no FTTC RFS date set and at some point we'll need to look elsewhere.

If as you say Annex M isn't affected by your short staffing then I don't understand why you don't just do it.

There's a fair amount of effort involved to support something like Annex M. For example you'd need to modify the existing Automated ordering/regrading process to support it, make product set price/feature decisions, online order process (with checks that Annex M is actually available on that number of course), training for customer facing teams, managed trial phase etc. These things will all take time to do.

That's not to say its not worth doing of course, BT's FTTP/FTTC products will take a long time to become widely available.

However Annex M is by no means available on every BT exchange supporting ADSL 2+ / WBC - so there would have to be some analysis done to determine the likely takeup/availability verses the effort to develop the product.

(you can see if a number has Annex M supported by BT wholesale using the availability checker at http://www.btwholesale.com/adslchecker - if Annex M is mentioned in the results text then it is supported, no mention means its not)

Hope that helps!