ISP Plusnet’s Missing 24/7 UK Support for Business Customers
Customers of Plusnet’s business broadband packages have recently begun to notice that the ISP has not been delivering on their pledge of offering “dedicated 24/7 UK based customer support“, with some users complaining that their phone lines close down after 8pm – the same time as the weekday cut-off for residential support.
The issue first came to our attention during early April 2022, after a few of the customer complaints began to grace our inbox. People and businesses only rarely need to use ISP support lines, thus such issues can often go unnoticed for quite a while before they get picked up.
According to some early customer feedback, Plusnet is said to have initially rejected the complaints and allegedly insisted that their business support lines were operational 24/7. But they’ve now changed their tune.
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A Plusnet spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:
“We provide 24/7 support for our business customers if they have a fault with their service. We are aware that some customers are getting a message to say the support lines are closed, when they call after 8PM. We are currently investigating why this is happening and will provide a fix as soon as possible and we’re sorry for the inconvenience caused.”
The issue is believed to be larger than the ISP first thought, although they’ve so far been unable to say precisely what the problem is or when it will be resolved. Not what you’d expect on a business broadband package.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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This is a joke. Typical of the type of problems at this ISP. Steer clear.
What alternative would you suggest then r.e business BB ?
Friends of mine run a small cafe and use Zen small business broadband.
They are happy with it so far but like most things these days you get what you pay for. (Or not in the case of Plusnet)
@s7eve
AAISP, Zen or Aquiss. Even BT if you really have to, even though Plusnet are owned by BT.
It’s very obvious what’s happened here…
To save money the call centre now closes at 8pm, and PlusNet were hoping that nobody would notice. Either that or it was done and nobody thought of the business customers… I’m not sure which is worse. There is 0 chance this wasn’t intentional.
I was with PlusNet for 20 years before leaving in 2021. Their service was excellent, and the product had nice little extras that you wouldn’t get elsewhere. These days you could be waiting for 40 minutes before the phones are answered, promises were never kept (had to complain on a forum after they closed a ticket saying that a conversation never happened. Turns out they never even tried to listen to the recording), faults on the line weren’t even checked, they just sent out another router. Bit of a shambles really.
A very ungraceful fall.
I’m guess the out of hours phone cover is a very small part of their operation, maybe only a couple of people and they either weren’t logged onto the call platform or it wasn’t configured correctly to pass calls them.
Can’t be that as it’s closed 8pm for a few years now it’s likely the IVR not recognising business customers lines as most input a mobile number when using the automated system…the same one that ensures for faults and tech calls there are no wait times as you now get a call back from the faults dept if used correctly although this system is yet to be implemented for customer service calls but like all providers luckily it’s still lower then the rest.. The SMB calls is a strange one though indeed definitely open 24 hours still for support
“To save money the call centre now closes at 8pm, and PlusNet were hoping that nobody would notice.”
It’s not that.
The call centre has closed at 8pm since at least 2020, if not earlier.
Out of hours support is either remote based or outsourced but it has definitely been working the last couple years.
Plusnet’s response wouldn’t be “we are investigating” if the reason was simply that they closed their call centre at nights all of a sudden.
Business support has always been 24/7 and still is.
Something wrong with the phone system is all.
Maybe Plusnet should contact their ISP’s business support line and report a fault?
But seriously, I would not use a business ISP that can’t even manage to operate their own phones, and doesn’t have an e-mail address.
They probably figured that no serious business would use their products so there was no point keeping it open longer.
This is still ongoing.
They basically do not have a working business phone number any more. All the calls get answered by residential.