2006 Survey - The Results are here!

[Justin]

As regular Freedom2Support users no doubt know, every year we run a Survey on the level of service provided by freedom2surf over the last year.

The results for the 2006 survey are now online and can be found at:
http://www.freedom2support.net/about/2006survey.php

2006 Results Analysis
In our 2006 survey we found that a whopping 61% of all respondants would not recommend freedom2surf to a friend with 2% unsure and just 37% feeling that freedom2surf is now worthy of such recommendation. In 2005 98% of respondants would recommend a friend and just 0.6% wouild not - a dramatic turnaround.

Phone Technical Support has been another area which has drifted, in 2005 it would take on average 10-15 mins to get through via phone, this year, 40-60 minutes is the average according to our survey with some people waiting over 90 minutes, which is unheard of before this year on our survey. In addition the top satisfaction rating has drifted to Satisfied from Very Satisfied.

Support by phone isn't the only area our users says has fallen. In 2005 more support emails were answered in the first few hours than any other time slot in our survey. 2006 and top with 30% is I never recieved a reply, second place is 2-4 Days with 15.4% of the vote with 2005 favourite finishing bottom of the pile - just 4 people recieving a reply in a few hours. Satisfaction rating again has slipped, this time from Satisfied to dissatisfied.

Rounding other peformance questions up, 23% of you had problems with billing, up from 10% in 2005. Overall feeling was the level of service in Sales, Broadband Admin, Domain Admin and Billing had decreased from a rating of good in 2005 to average in 2006.

Value for money on products was pretty much unchanged, however the overall rating for ADSL, Web Hosting, Email Hosting, Wifi and Domain service had decreased somewhat to scores around 3/5 against 2005 average of 4/5. The majority of freedom2surf customers that responded have ADSL at speeds of 4MB or over.

The Pipex Takeover
78% of users were suprised when Pipex bought up freedom2surf last October, with 89% of users feeling that such move has had a negative effect on freedom2surf, almost 60% of these feeling it had made freedom2surf decline greatly. In addition 34.6% of respondants felt this made the technical support service decline to a service described as much poorer, with another 30% feeling it had made the service just poorer.

But why did the takeover effect such service? 75% blamed decreasing reliability of services such as email, webspace and adsl, 55% felt losing key staff members following the office move did not help and the increase in call wait times, change in policies attracted 48% of our responders, loss of previous directors Nick and Chris Panayis weighed in with 45.4% and changes to network and services was just shy of half all respondants.

You can read more on the facts and figures obtained in this survey at the following link:
http://www.freedom2support.net/about/2006survey.php

The winners of the prize of a Logitech Cordless Desktop bundle have this afternoon been contacted by email. Comiserations if this was not you - there will always be next year.

Thank you all for your input in this survey, and lets hope the next one I can be a touch more positive!

Kind Regards,

[kmount]

Phew ... astounding eh. Actually, no it isn't.

[elrandom3]

Originally Posted by Justin

The winners of the prize of a Logitech Cordless Desktop bundle have this afternoon been contacted by email. Comiserations if this was not you - there will always be next year.

Given the results, lets hope you didn't send the e-mails to f2s addresses

To be honest, nothing there really suprises me given the kind of talk on the forums recently. Although it'd be interesting to do another straw poll now to see what people think of the phone support within the last 3 or so weeks, seeing as how the f2s staff say there are now no queues..

[kmount]

I've forwarded it onto Maria (with Justins blessing) with the hope of her seeing the figures in text and act upon them.

[Justin]

I would normally send a copy to F2S anyway, used to go through Adam but as he's not there anymore I thought if you wanted to you might as well seeing as you brought it up

[kmount]

press@f2s.net might fancy a copy of it ... Doubt they'd post it though

[keith_thfc]

Justin

Great work.

I hope you get a chance to put a link up over on adslguide as I feel potential new customers would find this pretty informative.

Keith

[Justin]

Cheers Keith - I did that just now.

[acidtechno]

thanks for that

yes, the results are not surprising, very interesting to see things on a bigger scale though because this does show the bigger picture and is proof to the owners of F2S that they have done a poor job at transfering an excellent ISP to their control. They should have now learnt from the mistakes that have been made.

I think I can identify which bit chaz wrote in section 30.

there's a lot of 'dump pipex' style comments too, about leaving pipex to go back to how it was before F2S were taken over, sadly it's not possible for a company owned by pipex to leave pipex, it appears many of us are wishing via hopeless dreams.

some funny points if you look closely in other parts of the survey,

for example 44. Other: goat information center
acidtech-could this be the work of farmergiles?

was a great idea whoever suggested a chat room ( chaz? ).

46.
less swearing and bickering
acidtech-I haven't seen much of that

others
Life in general.
my health
Your front page could do with a warmer more friendly welcome

acidtech-could put a nice picture of a fireplace with burning fire and burnt papers on it with the Pipex logo I suppose -jk

I didn't tick the box to win the prize, I prefer my wired gear, someone else deserves it. But looks like I won the prize for longest comment

overall great work on the survey, it's nice how you put all the information together at the end, excellent summary Justin.

[kmount]

Which bit do you reckon I wrote?

[acidtechno]

"I feel that without Justin and his team..."

[kmount]

Well done ... find anymore?

[acidtechno]

lol, you got me going now,

hmmm,

40. Other: It now seems to be 'bottom line' profit over quality of service, and that stinks! It also never works. or Other: Fixing problems that don't exist, thus creating afore mentioned problem!

42. "The changes to the systems since the takeover, I'm sure were with good intentions..."

44. "I feel a chat room type scenario might..."

In 46. And what are the things you feel could be improved? it was rather worrying how many replies were targeted towards official F2S and not Freedom2Support, because the question was about Freedom2Support.

this was pretty funny though,

"electric shock probes could be fitted to f2surf staff so that when we want answers, a button on the f2support site can be pushed to make them sit up and reply to posts in the forum. :-)"

shocked at, an example of wrongly answered,
"Net Usage Stats, 4months they been down, f****** get them working right, i am fed up with call you about them. it took you 3 months to realise they were down! tut"

surprised at,
"The forum system is a bit "clunky". c.f, the adslguide site wich has a better forum system."

I am laughing my behind off, adslguide forum system BETTER than F2Support? I'll pretend I never heard that comment.

[mezzosoprano]

Oh, I'm sorry to be so cynical but really, this just bears out what the forum has been saying for months. Since Pipex took over, it has been one problem after another. No, of course we can't go back to the 'good old f2s days' but it's up to the new management to create the 'new good days' for us loyal customers.

Has to be said, I recently had a connection problem which I wasn't sure was router or line based. Got through straight away to technical support, who were efficient, helpful and even rang me back - twice. (It was my router, BTW.)

However, I had a major email outage a couple of days again, rang f2s, waited 20 mins and got bored, and sent an email. Needless to say, no reply yet...

The moral of this story is, don't have a problem at the same time as everyone else....

Originally Posted by acidtechno

surprised at,
"The forum system is a bit "clunky". c.f, the adslguide site wich has a better forum system."

I am laughing my behind off, adslguide forum system BETTER than F2Support? I'll pretend I never heard that comment.

I 100% agree with that, The ADSLG forum is good, From an info point of view, But the software is rubbish.

[No Rest]

Like most people I'm not surprised at the results or the nosedive in satisfaction ratings. I can only hope F2S / Pipex are going to implement changes to make improvements. But I have my doubts! I think Pipex will be more concerned with improving profit margins than they will be with improving the quality of service

[Justin]

Just as I've got a few PM's on it, previous years results can be found here:
http://www.freedom2support.net/about/surveys.php

[toddfamily]

Yoy say The winners of the prize of a Logitech Cordless Desktop bundle have this afternoon been contacted by email. Comiserations if this was not you - there will always be next year.

Are you sure? With results like that, perhaps there won't be a next year.

[Justin]

At the end of the day the customers will have to go somewhere and if they do merge into Pipex/Nildram etc we'll become a support site to them, if they're sold off like AOL's customers were we'll become a support site to whoever they are sold off too, but I don't see either of those happening anytime soon and I don't see the later ever happening as thats just silly.

We'll always be around, in some shape of form even if the f2s name goes.

[wfnuk]

The survey is a great idea and thank you for taking the time and trouble to conduct it.

I think that the results accurately confirm the feelings of decline in F2S amongst customers and, generally, shows the increasing levels of dissatisfaction since the Pipex takeover. However, it is a great pity that only 240 people responded to it as this only represents circa 5.88% of the 4000+ members currently subscribed to this Forum. I feel that it would have carried a lot more clout had more members bothered to respond to it, instead of just the minority that did.

[acidtechno]

I think it still represents how most customers feel ( from the thousands ), because we have all experienced the same problems with services, so it would be silly to think this survey has no worth.

If more people were to have taken part, I think the results would have been similar.

[wfnuk]

Originally Posted by acidtechno

...so it would be silly to think this survey has no worth.

Who said that.....?

[Justin]

I was disappointed with the numbers as well - We have a huge amount more users who use the site throughout the course of a week and I've had hoped they more would respond.

However we promoted it all we could, through the top of every forum on these forums as an announcement, coverage on the Front Page as a Module above the news iterms even, as well as advertising it on ADSLGuide and the mailing lists, so isn't much more we could do

[acidtechno]

Originally Posted by wfnuk

Who said that.....?

anyone who could be likely to, especially F2S management and staff.

A lot more people knew about the survey Justin, I think it's down to laziness and time that more failed to take part. It shows not even the chance of a prize is enough to get a little bit of someones time.

Could have been a lot worse

[John]

Thanks for doing the survey Justin, as has been said, shame there were less respondants, I am not trying to cause an arguement here, but I wonder if we had a larger responce if the results may have not been as a drastic change from what what near enough excellent last year to poor this year (I appreciate that is "rounding" the phrases off but you get the idea of what I mean), as it could have been 200 -ive views and 40 postitive. But thanks again, hopefully F2S will take note of the results and do something about it.