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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

DSL Outage Day 5: Pipex Won't Help

Still no DSL. Pipex say that some engineers somewhere did some remote tests at 10am today (yes, they didn't call me) - apparently someone did some on site tests at 7am yesterday (yes, no-one told me that either). They now want me to swap out all the equipment at my end and try "another router" (that's the ISP equivalent of being told to "reinstall Windows" I think - the thing that's too hard for you to do so you go away). Ricky in technical support (who's a bit tired of me I think) tells me that unless I do that they will close the ticket. Now, call me naive, but I believe that the ISP should keep the ticket open until the problem is resolved, and that to tell the customer they can't continue fault-finding until they have bought new equipment and tried it on the line is a bit much. Shouldn't they be actually, you know, helping me?

I then got to have a long and interesting conversation with a recent graduate called Alan, who is a supervisor in the customer service department (thanks to Marc and Simon for your good work helping me to that point). Alan tells me that my 5 day outage has gone on for "a short time compared with most faults at Pipex". He told me he is a Pipex customer at home, and that these things could drag on for "weeks and weeks". Apparently it's not just the case with the product I am buying from them - all Pipex DSL services have the same relaxed approach to customer service, where anything that takes less than a week to resolve is the blink of an eye. To get any better servcie apaprently I would "have to get a leased line".

Part of the problem is actually the fact that Pipex has put the customer service team into the middle of the loop. I'm sure that's great for the bulk of the calls where the solution is in the script ("yes, sir, if you plug in the power it will work a lot better"). But for actual cases where there is an actual fault their process is clearly broken. When the actual engineering staff need a customer to do something (restart a modem, for example), that request is logged in the call ticket and then an "escalation team" at the call centre eventually stumbles on that message and calls the customer 2-3 days later. Alan said this is because the workload at the network operations centre (NOC) is so understaffed that there are no circumstances under which anyone would act differently - Alan tells me that engineers "never call customers". So that's why each time the process has stalled on "ask customer to..." it has only been restarted when I have called them.

Alan gave me the impression that I should be very grateful that everything is going so well and had only taken 5 days so far. He said they had actually diagnosed and fixed a problem today, and that the NOC would now be looking at the misconfiguration that seemed to exist in the new LLU service Pipex tried unsuccessfully to migrate me to in Tuesday. As they are closed Sunday, I shouldn't expect to hear back from them before maybe Wednesday, since the service I'm getting is apparently "very good" and exactly what Alan would expect. He sounded very satisfied with Pipex's performance here and found my amazement that Pipex considered 5 days of outage to be the blink of an eye pretty tiresome. He was unwilling to admit Pipex had caused the problem - that, apparently, can only be determined in retrospect.

Alan finally got rid of me by telling me that if I had a complaint (and he clearly could see no grounds for one) I should write to customercare@pipex.net - of course, they work 9-6 Mon-Fri so my comments wouldn't be read until at least Monday. At this point I'd have to say that many years of satisfaction with Pipex are in tatters. I'd strongly recommend any existing Pipex customer to migrate away to an ISP that actually realises that a two week outage is unacceptable. Do it now, when everything is working, becuase when there's a problem it will take you for ever to get it resolved and then you won't have the tools you need to find another service provider. I don't know who that is yet, but I have some suggestions from readers so I'll let you know.

posted at 2:57 PM (UK) | |