Plusnet billing failures

Flyiñg Ñuñ 2°¹8 + on desktop wrote:
Clive Page wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:

I've just checked mine. Usually I get emailed withi 5 days of the
1st of the month and the the money is paid on around the 4th of the
month. So far, no email and my account hasn't been debited. I
suppose I ought to contact them in the morning.


I went through that process yesterday and it took for ages. If you
don't have unlimited free calls on your 'phone, be warned the waiting
time to get to a human being may well take ½ hour or more. The guy I
talked to did all the checks, and insisted that my account was
debited on the 31st August this time (as with you I'm usually debited
on 4th of the following month. I've double checked my back account
and the money has definitely not been taken from there. The last
payment I have made was on 4th August. The PN guy double checked
again and insisted that I owed them nothing and am currently up to
date. Makes me wonder which John Doe is paying for my PN BB then.

At last PN took the money from my account yesterday, just 1 week later
than ever before. T'was a long hiccup they just had!!
--
Heard melodies are sweet but those Unheard are sweeter
FN 2º¹8+. Mungo Brandybuck of Buckland

On 07/09/2018 18:19, Clive Page wrote:
Plusnet have changed their billing system and sent me two emails, first
to say that this months bill would be delayed, and later to say that it
was available.* But the usual web links to billing simply don't work,
bringing up all sorts of error messages.** Don't they test new systems
at all?** Or maybe they have hired the same IT bunch as TSB?

There are scores of postings on the forum complaining about the same thing.

If you try to contact them via webchat, despite the hours being posted
as 7.30 am to 10pm seven days a week and it currently being just after
6pm, the message says the customer service team are currently offline.
Hopeless.

It is still hopeless.

Can't download invoices from the billing area (nothing works at all with
Firefox)
Chat doesn't work
60 minutes to wait for support

I cannot believe this is still a mess after a month.

Mr Baker (the CEO) should be comforting himself for destroying the
reputation of an otherwise good service.


--
Mike Perkins
Video Solutions Ltd
www.videosolutions.ltd.uk

On 01/10/2018 13:51, Mike Perkins wrote:
On 07/09/2018 18:19, Clive Page wrote:
Plusnet have changed their billing system and sent me two emails,
first to say that this months bill would be delayed, and later to say
that it was available. But the usual web links to billing simply
don't work, bringing up all sorts of error messages. Don't they test
new systems at all? Or maybe they have hired the same IT bunch as TSB?

There are scores of postings on the forum complaining about the same
thing.

If you try to contact them via webchat, despite the hours being posted
as 7.30 am to 10pm seven days a week and it currently being just after
6pm, the message says the customer service team are currently offline.
Hopeless.

It is still hopeless.

Can't download invoices from the billing area (nothing works at all with
Firefox)
Chat doesn't work
60 minutes to wait for support

I cannot believe this is still a mess after a month.

Mr Baker (the CEO) should be comforting himself for destroying the
reputation of an otherwise good service.


I did manage to have an online chat session the other day to sort out
why I didn't get any referral credit last month. They blamed the new
billing system, and have allegedly applied some credit to my account, to
compensate. I saved a transcript of the chat, and the timestamp on that
was 3 hours adrift (they said it was 11pm when it was actually 8pm).
Don't know whether that might explain why they appear to shut down early
some days?!
--
Cheers,
Roger
____________
Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom
checked.

On 02/10/2018 17:35, Roger Mills wrote:
I did manage to have an online chat session the other day to sort out why I didn't get any referral credit last month. They blamed the new billing system, and have allegedly applied some credit to my account, to compensate.

I thought that the online chat system had been suspended since they so inadvisedly "updated" the billing system? So you were lucky to find it.

The system seems not to have improved much over the last month, but the two bills I've had seem to be correct (unlike some others reporting on their Forum). Their programmers seem to be pretty stupid: one of the problems lots of us get is that when you click on "download your bill" it produces a file called $STANDARD with no file extension. So a PDF reader doesn't get invoked. If you manually change the filename so it has .pdf at the end, then it works ok. It beats me how any programmer could do anything so dumb?


--
Clive Page

Clive Page wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:

I've just checked mine. Usually I get emailed withi 5 days of the 1st
of the month and the the money is paid on around the 4th of the month.
So far, no email and my account hasn't been debited. I suppose I ought
to contact them in the morning.


There may be something useful going on in Plusnet. Today I checked
again, can see a drop-down selector for the date of my bill, and when I
select the latest one, it does indeed download it. But it calls it
$STANDARD with no file type, so neither of my PDF readers (Adobe,
Sumatra) know what to do with it. If I go into Widows File Explorer and
rename the file with a .pdf extension, I can read it.

Works fine on a Mac. Even the browser was able to suggest the right viewer
when downloading it. So it seems the MIME type is correctly set.

So probably this is the main remaining thing that needs fixing. But one
wonders how dumb a programmer has to be to think that providing a
download without a file type is a sensible move.

You do realise that the file extension doesn't do anything about the file
type, right? Windows is the dumb one that isn't able to work out a file
type * without* an extension.

And I still don't understand why they can't simply send out an email with
a PDF attachment, which would avoid all this logging in nonsense.

Data protection. Email is insecure. They'd be hauled in front of the ICO if
they did that.

On 15/11/2018 18:14, Chris wrote:
Clive Page wrote:

You do realise that the file extension doesn't do anything about the file
type, right? Windows is the dumb one that isn't able to work out a file
type * without* an extension.

I know, but that stupid behaviour is on an operating system which, whether we like it or not, accounts for around 90% of the home computers in existence, so a company with predominantly home computer users as customers ought to take account of that.

And I still don't understand why they can't simply send out an email with
a PDF attachment, which would avoid all this logging in nonsense.

Data protection. Email is insecure. They'd be hauled in front of the ICO if
they did that.

I don't think that can be an obstacle - other organisations send out bills by email. It's just a matter of asking permission of the customer first.

--
Clive Page

In article , Clive Page
writes
On 15/11/2018 18:14, Chris wrote:
Clive Page wrote:

You do realise that the file extension doesn't do anything about the file
type, right? Windows is the dumb one that isn't able to work out a file
type * without* an extension.

I know, but that stupid behaviour is on an operating system which,
whether we like it or not, accounts for around 90% of the home
computers in existence, so a company with predominantly home computer
users as customers ought to take account of that.

And I still don't understand why they can't simply send out an email with
a PDF attachment, which would avoid all this logging in nonsense.
Data protection. Email is insecure. They'd be hauled in front of the
ICO if
they did that.

I don't think that can be an obstacle - other organisations send out
bills by email. It's just a matter of asking permission of the
customer first.

OVO have stopped sending them to me.
--
bert