Not raising a support ticket

A couple of weeks ago I had a support ticket raised as i was receiving 80% packet loss for over a week and was constantly being disconnected. Basically my connection was unusable at the time.

Around the 2nd/3rd Feb it suddenly started to work...until this Saturday when i have issues ago. This time its only 20-30% packet loss... but either way its unusable as everything is just painfully slow.

I spoke to technical support on Saturday who said that they could see the packet loss and would ping my router from there end until Monday to gain some information to pass onto BT. I spoke to them today and was told that the ping test tool was down over the weekend. Nice one... 2 days wasted. Im glad zen check there tools are working regularly.

Now when i speak to technical support im told ill need to do some further tests when i get home. Fair dos im happy with that... however im not happy by the fact that no support ticket has been raised when there is one serious problem with my connection.

When i spoke to Zen at lunch i even asked for a ticket to be raised and was told that it couldnt until i had completed all the testing. Something that i wasnt asked to do on Saturday when i intially made the call.

I never had this ticket raising problem previously... but does anyone know of any changes to ticket raising in the last couple of weeks or is this technical supports way of making sure they reach internal SLAs and resolution times?

I get the impression you need to ring up zen twice before they'll go through the BT hoops and raise a fault with them.

Well so far ive rung them 3 times regarding my current problem. They better raise one when i ring them back later.

I seem to get the feeling that it really depends on who you speak too. Ive spoken to people in there tech support department which i couldnt fault at all and were top notch... however ive spoken to some that sound like theyve just woken up and dont seem interested.

Very strange, it does sound as though it wasn

Perhaps confusion over the raising of a ticket with BT as opposed to Zen itself?

Zen won't be able to raise a ticket with BT until they've run some tests to confirm that there is evidence of a BT fault, and that it's not your equipment/internal wiring etc.

what gets me every time with the zen fault check list is when you ring them and say "my internet was working fine 10 minutes ago and now it isn't and i aint changed anything" they still go through the check sheet like its gospel, when its obvious some engineer has been pratting around in your exchange and done something he shouldn't or there's an exchange fault.

I got some posh chap on the phone @ zen last week, who sounded completely uninterested in what he was doing as he went through the the check list with me, it sounded like he was playing Russian roulette as he did it and had no will to live.

But then again, the amount of times that people say its gone off and changing the filter seems to resolve it. Or factory reset the router. We try and do the diagnostics so less downtime is incured by questions of what it could be.

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what gets me every time with the zen fault check list is when you ring them and say "my internet was working fine 10 minutes ago and now it isn't and i aint changed anything" they still go through the check sheet like its gospel, when its obvious some engineer has been pratting around in your exchange and done something he shouldn't or there's an exchange fault.

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Oh, I see, so you're now qualified as a telecoms engineer are you? Failed miserably at economics, so you've decided to turn your hand to something a little more technical?

How on earth is it "obvious"? There are so many things that could go wrong between the exchange and an individual's ADSL router/modem. You have such a capacity for generalisation and passing off carp as fact.

Given your technical aptitude, I think it's perfectly obvious why they go through the checklist every time. There is a wide, wide margin between what is fact and what you believe.

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sounded like he was playing Russian roulette as he did it and had no will to live

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He probably realised it was you and had one of those "oh no, not him, why me" moments....

Edited by deleted (Mon 12-Feb-07 21:23:14)

I can't speak for what obviously sounds like an inappropriate attitude, but I can speak for the diagnostic requirements. While I can understand they may seem tedious in some cases, they are completely necessary in order to get an issue succesfully progressed with BT in a timely manner. Miss something off, or have BT contradicting the results of information provided to them, and the fault will be delayed - whether basic diagnostics at BT's end would show a simple BT fault or not. Simply put, if there is an anomaly in diagnostics then delays occur. Getting full, accurate, data upfront ensures the issue can progress.

There is also the flip-side of the coin; how many times do you think the Tech Support team hear somebody say "I haven't changed a thing." ? Often they haven't, but something has changed unknown to them (Windows updates, network admin or other person in the house changing something somewhere). Personally I've "not changed anything" in the past myself, but I was running a game for the first time which bizarrely resulted in a Netgear router losing sync, and required a reboot to fix. The most innocuous thing can cause a fault and seem quite illogical.

The benefit to our approach is we have better than average performance when it comes to raising genuine faults to BT - with the majority of faults being identified as BT faults, rather than 'customer equipment fault' problems or 'no fault found' situations. This is because we work to eliminate the customer side from the equation and make sure enough data is passed to BT so they can work to find and fix the real cause of the problem. Eliminating 'no faults' or 'customer equipment faults' early ensures the customer gets a real fix to their problems far quicker than throwing a fault over the fence to BT and bouncing it back-and-forth only to discover weeks (and BT engineer/admin charges for the customer) later that a faulty router or network setup was the cause all-along. It also puts us in a position to dispute engineer/admin charges so it is extremely rare for us to face these (and therefore we obviously avoid having to pass them on to customers). In short; it pays to put the time in upfront for everybody involved.

ta,
Phil.

Edited by deleted (Mon 12-Feb-07 21:34:50)

Thanks for that explanation Phil, I can understand the need for it far better now.