ISP PlusNet Says Farewell to 24/7 UK Based Telephone Support

One of PlusNet’s most attractive features over the years has been its ability to offer around the clock customer support via United Kingdom based call centres, but no longer.

Customers of the budget ISP have this week been told that, with effect from 13th July 2015, the provider will no longer be able to boast about the merits of offering “awarding-winning … UK-based customer support 24/7” on their broadband packages.

Instead customers have been advised that the hours of operation for their UK support teams will be reduced to run from 7.30am to 10pm every day and they’re attempting to sell this as a good thing.

PlusNet Statement (Customer Letter)

“We are always striving to improve our award winning customer service, and as a result we have been looking at our customer support opening hours. After extensively analysing the times at which our customers call, and how long they have to wait, we are revamping the call centre opening hours.

This will allow us to have the majority of our staff working when customer demand is at its peak. From 13th July 2015 our UK customer support lines will be open from 7.30am to 10pm every day. Our business customer support is open 24/7.”

In fairness PlusNet were one of the few providers of any real scale to offer 24/7 UK based support, with many others only being able to achieve such a feat by outsourcing their call centres to other countries and we all know how disliked that practice is.

At the same time the new hours still mean their call centres will be open for longer than most, although customers have every right to feel frustrated at the development. Admittedly there’s still email and online support solutions too, but those don’t always work as well as they perhaps could. Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting this.

The latest move comes little more than a week after PlusNet also quietly dropped the 19.5Mbps upload speed of their “Unlimited Fibre” (FTTC) package to just 2Mbps (here).