MORE UNHAPPY CUSTOMERS

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Review by hypergiant2
member for 5.4 years, 0 visits, last login: 5.4 years ago
lodged 5.4 years ago

undisclosed location
Contract price not specified.
"None"
"Worst Experience Ever"
"Avoid this company if you value your sanity"
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

We got cut off without any notification for going over our limit. Wasted hours buying more bandwidth ended up paying twice.

So angry we cancelled the same day and migrated. Zen have been chasing us for £2.50 YES £2.50 ever since.

Just had a phone call from a credit controller arguing and wasting 30 mins of my time saying they want the £2.50 Ive never been treated/spoken to so badly by a business in my life.

What the hell is wrong with this company they certainly do not deserve any �excellent customer service� accolades at all.

Chasing a very unhappy ex customer for £2.50 is frankly ridiculous.

Patrick S

Review of Zen Internet www.zen.co.uk
"Extremely poor customer service"

We have been with Zen for over a year now and I always thought they were quite good. Last week, I was proved wrong. Our internet went down due to problems at Zen. It lost us income and caused great stress to the entire team as we are web based. I had to pay an IT engineer to come out immediately who charged on a Friday afternoon. When I phoned Zen, they explained they had problems that day but did not warn us in advance.
I became very angry as they were unwilling to offer any decent goodwill gestures. Another company that is greedy and arrogant-when will they learn-perhaps when their clients leave them.
Their only solution was to upgrade to a higher level service and pay more money. This is unethical and greedy. I accept problems happen but it is always to do with how you deal with them. Avoid Zen, they simply do not care about their customers as we are just a number. Having said that, without us, they wouldn't have a company.

Review of Zen Internet www.zen.co.uk
They have AWFUL customer services at times. They can be very condescending towards small businesses and refuse to accept blame for something that is clearly their fault.

Our internet connnection was on/off/on/off for weeks and I followed all of their instructions for days and days to no avail. They then told me I needed to BUY a new router...even though they supplied the original 1 with the possible problem.

To make things worse - they don't even know if this is the problem! It could be something else at their end - but they refuse to do anything else until we either replace the router WHICH THEY SUPPLIED and test if it has a problem - or accept all costs involved if the router is found to have a problem further down the line!

Review of Zen Internet www.zen.co.uk
Transition to Zen has been horrible. Sales agent sold me the wrong product, credit card charged, order cancelled, credit card charge not reversed, I was not notified of the cancellation. Only by checking on web site did I discover the problem. Efforts to recover included changing me over to Zen before making sure I had the required router in hand. Indeed, today is the day and the router is 'in the mail' but not here. Friday - no Internet nor broadband no phone service for the coming weekend, but that seems not to matter to Zen Internet. They have another unsatisfied customer.

Review of Zen Internet www.zen.co.uk
How can I describe Zen? In all honesty, "really poor" sums it up for me. We installed 2 new business lines in July 2009. For redundancy, we put ADSL on one line through Zen and one through IDNet.

The IDNet line has been fine ever since; the Zen line has been very, very poor. Bear in mind that the BT lines were put in at the same time (there's a 1 digit difference in the line numbers).

Latency and up/down stream speeds are not good in comparison to IDNet. Disconnections occur daily; once we experienced around 4 hours of downtime during business hours. Support was slow, and even when we got a response the answers provided were unsatisfactory. Things like:

"the information I have available on previous logs doesn't allow me to determine the cause of your fault."

Well thanks, that's really helpful!

In my opinion, they really have gone downhill since the good old days. We still have them as a backup provider but there's no way I'd consider ordering future ADSL connections from them.

most of that really should of been fixed in the first 1-2 calls, i am guessing you still needed the line fixing once you moved to another ISP as the fault will still be there with your line

but 40 calls not sure but i think they be happy they no longer have you as an customer due to stress on tech support (even thought it was there own doing maybe) i have never called ZEN up before so not sure what they are like normally

yes but i have been a customer for 5 Yrs!!

This obviously counts for nothing

40 calls being due to the incompetencies of the staff.

Not so much as a sorry.. They promised a BT engineer visit and now they cant even find record of the conversation. Truly bad service and as you can see its not just me that feels the same.

The only time I hear from them is when I make a negative comment on here.

They dont call back when they say they will and they dont do what they promise.

glcmcfc,

The 40 calls are via email. There was no need for an engineer as I was working on other stabilisation options for the line, and I was in contact with you before you posted on here.

I also did try and call several times and left voice messages explaining that I wanted to help and need more information. There was an issue in the initial calls and as promised a complaint was raised and steps have been taken to make sure this does not happen again as it was completely unacceptable.

As it stands now, the line has dropped twice in 2 weeks for about 45mins each time. The speed dropped from 17mb to 16mb and is still above the thresholds of what BTW class as a fault.

I cannot ask an engineer to look for a fault that does not exist. I did explain this in the last email to which your reply was that you were leaving. The posts from other people needed to be addressed and this is the reason the Social Networking Team was created inside the company, so we can address these issues away from the forums and make sure the complaints are raised if needed. I know some of the afore mentioned posts have been dealt with away from the Forums.

I apologise that you feel we are not up to the same standard as you once regarded us at, however if you are not willing to place the modem back into the test socket without the extension we cannot ascertain where the cause of the fluctuating SNR is and therefore cannot try to resolve the issue that you are currently seeing.

I agree the line did drop, and since I have worked on the line, the speed has increased from 9mb - 16mb and stable less the 2 drops. In my last email correspondence with you, I explained that it is possible the drops are caused locally. This would require diagnostics to be carried out on site by you before I or anyone else here can try to help you further.

As I did say before and also via the initial emails with you, the initial contact you had with us was not dealt with at all properly and this was raised a formal complaint and dealt with accordingly as I promised you it would be. I have never said to you that I was not willing to help, I have always explained and still maintain that I am willing to help as are any Zen Support members.

Regards,

In reply to a post by glcmcfc:

yes but i have been a customer for 5 Yrs!!

This obviously counts for nothing

40 calls being due to the incompetencies of the staff.

Not so much as a sorry.. They promised a BT engineer visit and now they cant even find record of the conversation. Truly bad service and as you can see its not just me that feels the same.

The only time I hear from them is when I make a negative comment on here.

They don't call back when they say they will and they don't do what they promise.

the bottom line is zen are still the best and I've had a few bad runs with them which when looked it in depth amount to bt being at fault every time
sure the chief Mr tang should do more but he probably does his best when dealing with the likes of BT who in all reality know nothing about broadband
Wasim at zen is first class in getting things done and reports back to you daily plus the fact he's a good lad and keeps his head down

i get on well with all the staff however and after 10 years being with them am still happy

glcmcfc,

I was intending to reply last night saying that, on the evidence of this thread, you appear to be close to a situation where nothing Zen can will make you happy, so you are likely to be disappointed no matter what. You can always find stories of dissatisfied customers - they prove very little without data on how many customers are satisfied.


Any form of DSL is susceptible to environmental conditions and conditions on the line used to deliver the service. There is only so much that any ISP and phone company can do without disproportionate effort - if the problem is a 300 pair cable being sub-optimal (as I saw mentioned in one post in another ISP's forum here about a VDSL speed drop in the past few days), it won't be replaced just because one person's DSL service has lost speed so long as it is possible to keep that service above the fault threshold. The most that person can reasonably expect is to be swapped to another pair, though a BT engineer has already proved that other pairs perform similarly to the pair in use.

If the problem is electrical noise, that may be external to the phone system - in which case the phone company may have to invest a lot of effort in tracing the problem (especially if it is intermittent) and can only encourage the person responsible for the noise source to resolve it. Noise sources are often close to the DSL router or modem, especially if the internal wiring is sub-optimal, hence the encouragement to plug the router directly into the test socket.


Against this background, it is inevitable that BT Openreach and BT Wholesale have fairly stringent criteria for what they will accept as a fault. I did have an ADSL speed and stability fault a few years back. I had evidence of a substantial drop in noise margin and sync speed (to just below the Fault Threshold Rate), coupled with considerable instability in a line that used to go a month or more before resyncing.

Zen involved BT, who twice sent engineers who were looking for a quick fix. They swapped me to another pair (D side only one time, I think it was both D and E side the second) and went on their way, but the fault wasn't resolved. Zen got BT to send a third engineer, who investigated every joint on the line. He discovered the DP in the street outside our neighbour's house was full of water and the crimps on our pair were corroded. He replaced the crimps, dried out the joint, replaced the dessicant packs, sealed the joint and replaced the manhole cover. That resolved the root cause of the problem.


It sounds as if Zen have been quick to admit the initial handling of your case was sub-optimal - but the most that can be done now is for a complaint to be progressed so that they can learn the lessons and provide any necessary retraining. This doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to work with Zen - even if it feels like 'going through the motions', unless you follow the steps Zen outline, they can't report a fault to BT without BT requesting that the missing steps are gone through.

DSL routers can go bad, even filters can go bad, and internal wiring can be responsible for picking up noise. All these items are your responsibility and need to be eliminated first before BT will get involved. If BT get involved and one of these things turns out to be the reason (or they don't find something that would class as a fault), they will raise a substantial bill to Zen, which Zen will pass on to you.


If Leo has already got the speed to increase from 9Mb to 16Mb, that is a substantial increase. The two drops are unfortunate, but could be explained in part by BT's DLM being more optimistic about the improved line conditions than is really justified. Zen have to exhaust everything they can do from their end before involving BT, and BT are likely to close any fault raised without sending an engineer if it falls outside the fault threshold.

If you believe Zen is now an awful ISP, I encourage you to read the forums relating to other ISPs. Many people struggle to get the cheap consumer orientated ISPs even to understand their problem, which is not helped by the widespread use of offshore call centres. With Zen, you get through to a UK based person who is in a position to help. They won't get it right every time, but they provide a good service in my experience.


I can only conclude with my recent experience of upgrading from ADSL2+ to FTTC. I placed the order before Christmas, and found I was offered appointments online that didn't exist. I brought that up in this forum, and Zen responded saying that the online system was actually requesting a preference. Some discussion ensued, and I believe that Zen will hold true to their promise of the product manager considering the comments in that thread seriously. Hopefully they can change the online system to one that makes a live request to BT Openreach for engineer availability, as is apparently now possible.

The BT Openreach engineer turned up as expected, and FTTC started to work while he was here. I had an issue with the upstream line speed being capped to around the old ADSL2+ speed, so called Zen. They confirmed that there was no restriction they were aware of on the networks beyond my door (BT Openreach to the exchange, BT Wholesale to the Zen handover point and Zen's network from there). I explained that I thought I'd removed any restriction on my router, but agreed that the best approach was to run a speed test from a computer running a PPPoE client plugged directly into the BT FTTC modem to identify whether the problem was my side of the BT modem or now. As this speed test showed full FTTC upstream speed, I went back to my router configuration and corrected a further problem I'd missed in my earlier debugging attempts.

Zen did exactly what I asked - confirming quickly that there was nothing obvious to them. I had already spent some time reviewing my configurations and running speed tests using different services from several different computers on my wired network. I didn't want to waste any more effort on connecting a computer to the BT modem or on checking my router (a rack server running pfSense, which I can't expect Zen to support) without reassurance from Zen that there was no obvious problem beyond my network, which Zen were happy to provide.


Obviously, I can only go by my own experience, but I remain a happy Zen customer.

I agree 100% - I've never had anything but good service from Zen myself, and I've been with them around 8 or so years.

When I had an ADSL service, I had all sorts of issues with the line, Zen managed to get some semblance of performance out of the line, but at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that it was BT being the cause of the issue, and there was realistically no way to resolve it. (a large chunk of d-side cabling needed to be replaced - BT simply wouldn't entertain it).

I had issues with my FTTC install with engineer no-shows, and Zen worked tirelessly to resolve it for me, and I can now say, I've the best speed possible out of my line - full 80/20 sync and it's absolutely rock-solid.

I could choose another ISP and it may work out cheaper per month, but I know of only two other ISP's with the same level of service and technical ability as Zen, and they both would cost around the same per month.

I know from personal experience that Leo will do everything in his power to resolve an issue, but if you won't help him diagnose the issue, you shouldn't be surprised if your issue never gets fixed.

The other option is that Leo insists on a BT callout (which like Leo says, won't even happen to to BT fault criteria not being met), the engineer turns up, and finds a fault in your own equipment. You'll then be charged the (I think £180) call out fee for the engineer.

Who do you blame then?

Whatever the wrongs and right, who is to blame and what defines a fault, it became personal at this point "Leo Goile (11:06:05) : no need for the caps". Its never good practice to divert away from the issue in hand and start being pedantic.

I would guess the catalyst to post here and the point where glcmcfc starts calling time.

In reply to a post by NilSatisOptimum:

Whatever the wrongs and right, who is to blame and what defines a fault, it became personal at this point "Leo Goile (11:06:05) : no need for the caps". Its never good practice to divert away from the issue in hand and start being pedantic.

It might be that that was not the best response, but we don't know what (other than account details) was elided and where this fits in the entire situation. I don't see Leo's comment as particularly objectionable nor do I see it as personal - he may have just been wondering why everything was in caps, which isn't easy to read.

It's difficult to pick up behavioural cues in any text-based medium, including these forums. This is where a phone call can work better, in that it's easier to pick up on non-verbal cues.

Thanks for everyones response.

I appreciate all your views, some less than others but this is a forum and everyone is entitled to a view.

In terms of the situation I am still no better today than I was in December.

Zen promised me a BT engineer and now they say they are not sending one as its above the 13mb threshold.

As i said its not a speed issue its they way the line keeps disconnecting and hanging. New Router DGND3300 Netgear... not cheap. New wiring and all fitted by a phone engineer. Been into the master socket for 3 days and no better.

Zen have done nothing... Maybe they have been a good company for some but as you can see I am not alone.

Zen really should instruct BT after all this is what Phil promised me back in December.

Any ideas on any good ISPs would be appreciated because unless Zen actually man up and do something they have lost a loyal customer.

Thanks