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Thread ID: 128071	2012-12-02 04:01:00	Food for thought when deciding your next IP...	Sanco (683)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
1315856	2012-12-02 04:01:00	An excerpt of a newsletter from Actrix: By way of an update, you may have also seen that Orcon recently announced the redundancy of 59 support staff as they move their customer services team to a contractor in Manila, Philippines. Actrix has been in touch with Orcon and has offered to consider employing some of these staff to at least keep them in work and meet our increased demand for customer services staff. Makes me proud to be their customer actually...	Sanco (683)
1315857	2012-12-02 04:14:00	Actrix is a beacon in a dark, sad sea. Stop out-sourcing. This country needs to get back to a position of self sufficiency and self reliance. Control our currency, banking, business for our F&^%ing advantage, not scummy, low tax paying multi-national financial criminals. This country can be self reliant, if we back off from this crazy market driven drivel. Buy Kiwi, it's 100% here (patent pending :D ).	KarameaDave (15222)
1315858	2012-12-02 04:17:00	An excerpt of a newsletter from Actrix: By way of an update, you may have also seen that Orcon recently announced the redundancy of 59 support staff as they move their customer services team to a contractor in Manila, Philippines. Actrix has been in touch with Orcon and has offered to consider employing some of these staff to at least keep them in work and meet our increased demand for customer services staff. Makes me proud to be their customer actually... +1 :)	Trev (427)
1315859	2012-12-02 18:06:00	An excerpt of a newsletter from Actrix: Actrix has been in touch with Orcon and has offered to consider employing some of these staff to at least keep them in work and meet our increased demand for customer services staff . Yay!!! The Chief ******** In Charge of Orcon was saying they could go to iinet . . . . iinet is the pits . Yay for Actrix .	pctek (84)
1315860	2012-12-02 21:47:00	I agree, good on Actrix. After having suffered at the hands of this fancy newly outsourced helpdesk of Orcons, I can safely say I'm not a fan of their decision in the slightest. I've had an ongoing issue now for 4 weeks and have made bugger all progress until I wrote them this letter on Friday. I also posted it on G+ but I'll post it here too, in case anybody is interested: While waiting for my car WoF, I got a call back from the Telecommunications Dispute Resolution Service, they said I would need to formal notify Orcon in writing. So, I wrote this on my tablet and sent it to them: This is a formal complaint regarding my ADSL connection. I believe this was initially logged with Orcon on the 6th of November after I had begun experiencing issues the night before. Gaming became unstable, VoIP calls were shaky at best, and general throughput was severely hindered. I tested everything at my end, replaced the router with a spare I have etc, and the issue was most definitely not caused by anything at my side. I notified Orcon and suggested 3 things in this order: 1) Perform a port refresh 2) Change the port used at the cabinet 3) Change the pairs I am on It took a week for the first to be done, it took another week for the DSL profile to be changed to a "Robust" profile which made things worse, and then for some reason against my advice and against the advice of the Chorus technician performing the work (He rang me and told me he agreed with me) Orcon went and changed the pairs. The Chorus technician agreed we shouldn't have to use a Robust profile when I'm so close to the Cabinet (The Cabinet is at 120 XXX Road in XXX, I live at XXX which is only 300m away), and he also agreed they should be changing the port prior to changing the pairs. Throughout this whole process I've tried to speak with the Level 2 support team at Orcon, and have requested a grand total of 14 times that they call me back. They've done-so once. Also, against my suggestion, they continue to run a "monitor" on the line for 48 hours at a time, after each of the changes, which is semi-pointless when I can tell them straight away that the issue persists. The helpdesk are hopeless, nobody ever rings me back, and even after escalating this to the team leader for the first level technical support team a week ago, I've still made no progress. My complaint is not so much with the performance of the first level support, although they are not technically literate, I don't really expect them to be, but they've all generally been unhelpful. Only two people were helpful, and I've written to commend them, Joy and Ali were very helpful. Rather this formal complaint is with the process that Orcon have for escalations (Or complete lack thereof), the lack of urgency to get the issue resolved, the failure of Teir 2 support to ring me back even though I've requested a call back 14x now and they've only returned it once, the fact that the Helpdesk continually refers to my issue as a "speed problem" when I've told them right from the get-go it's related to packet loss and line conditions, and the fact that everything has taken an exceptionally long time to accomplish very little. I believe this is more than sufficient grounds for a formal complaint. I am incredibly unhappy. Every time I speak with your Helpdesk I end up feeling insanely frustrated, not just by the broken english that is spoken by most of them, and not just by their general lack of understanding, but their inability to deviate from their "Script" they have to read off. When I call in with an issue like this, and can tell them I've checked my router, replaced it, done an isolation test, I don't want them to then say to me "What lights can you see on your modem sir?". What a waste of time. It's almost been 4 weeks now, and we've accomplished very little, everything could have easily been done in a week. Chorus have come out twice now. The first technician came out and said he couldn't see anything wrong and had made no changes, yet he then lied to Orcon and said he had "Made a few small tweaks". I rang him after Orcon told me that and asked the Chorus technician to confirm what he'd done, again he confirmed he'd not changed anything. So, I gave Orcon his Cellphone number to call him and find out what those "few small tweaks" were he'd done, but nothing. The second Chorus technician that Orcon requested change the line pairs rang me before doing so. He agreed with me that the second step should be for the Port on the DSLAM to be changed, rather than the pairs, and he also suggested this to Orcon but they apparently refused. So he changed the line pair anyway which didn't improve things. It's now been almost a week since he's done that and nothing more has happened. Yes I'm frustrated, yes I'm angry. I'd like to remain an Orcon customer, but at the rate things are going, why would I want to? It's been like this the whole way with Orcon since I signed up. I wanted to use my own router when I signed up, and not the Genius router, but I was told I had to take the Genius Lite and sign up for 18 months or pay an additional $5 a month to rent a router that I was never going to use. Silly things like that have left an incredibly sour taste in my mouth. I was once a big advocate for Orcon, but in the last 6 months things have gone from bad to worse, and I'm incredibly fed up with it. Please take this as a formal complaint, please review your lack of escalation process, please sort out your level 2 tech support and their general lack of caring and failure to ring back, please sort out your first level technical support and give them some training, and again if you can pass on my gratitude to Joy and Ali for their help when I did speak with them, they were very helpful and shining examples of what a helpdesk representative should strive for, and I commend them for their assistance. Don't let me down Orcon, this shouldn't be a hard issue to fix. Please don't make it a difficult issue. Kind regards ... It's all fine and dandy to outsource if you never have to use the helpdesk, and Orcon were fantastic on their actual internet service quality, but lately they've begun to have a lot of issues across the board, not just specific to me, but major outages... Which has in turn required calling this horrible helpdesk of theirs. Not good :( Can honestly say that I've given them until the end of the week in my head, before I look at ditching them and moving to another ISP. I must say that 2talks VDSL plans are looking mighty appealing right now! It also turns out that the two people who helped me enough for me to write a previous email commending them some 2-odd weeks ago were both techs from NZ (Joy & Ali). Funny that!	Chilling_Silence (9)
1315861	2012-12-02 22:58:00	Funny you mention that both helpful people were techs from NZ . Had a problem with Telecom at the inlaws place a while back . Four weeks of the inlaws pissing about calling the help desk, always getting some overseas place, only to have to repeat every thing time and time again, and getting now where . Silly thing was Xtra kept saying it was a problem at their place, or the router, ( which was a new Thompson xtra supplied) - they sent out a second one, same problem . We went for a visit, and I tried a few tests, ended up ringing Xtra, tried to explain what the problem was but the chimps overseas couldn't understand . In the end I ran Telecom, and asked to speak to a NZ help person, after a few moments I got one, explain what I did for a job, and all the tests I had run,she looked at the case file and said it was going to be escalated up further . I suggested the problem is the user name/password and phone number are not in sync and the router which should auto detect it couldn't - can they try re syncing it at their end or I can manually put in the user name and password -- She said OK we can try-- Well what ya know, the lights flashed on the Router and bingo -- all working . ;)	wainuitech (129)
1315862	2012-12-02 23:00:00	wow. that's pretty shonky on Orcon's part. Thankfully, my naked has worked happily since I got it hooked up minus a couple of short outages. They've been doing right by me for once, minus the fact that I can't use my old router -_- I assume any calls I make to the customer help center will be taken by the same people though, I don't look forward to it. Shame I've signed up for donkeys to not pay for their bloody router rental. In any case, that exchange you're near wouldn't happen to be the one opposite the shell petrol station would it? :P	8ftmetalhaed (14526)
1315863	2012-12-02 23:28:00	Nah, I'm running off a cabinet which runs back to that Exchange. Also, you can use your own router, but just can't then use their Genius VoIP service. It's a non-issue for me coz my home number is with 2talk. I'm yet to see a success story of an NZ ISP outsourcing first-level helpdesk overseas. I believe it was either Telstraclear or Vodafone who only just brought it all back to NZ within the last 12-18 months?	Chilling_Silence (9)
1315864	2012-12-03 00:08:00	It was vodafone who brought the helpdesk back.	wainuitech (129)
1315865	2012-12-03 00:13:00	I have a house move very soon. I will be watching Orcon carefully for stuff ups.	DeSade (984)
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