For a communications company, communication has never been a VM strong point to be fair.
I worked there for a few years ~10 years ago and remember one morning there was about 1000 calls in the queue, it turned out nobody thought to let people know when the TV channel numbers were changing.
Wasn't having a go at the guy the other night so much, more the stupid rules in place staff are forced to follow. He even told me at the time he wasn't allowed to raise a multiple customer fault, even though it clearly was. My major gripe at the time was that it was at about 1am in the morning and I urgently needed my work VPN working for the morning. Waiting until 9am, when others started noticing the problem to get the issue raised was a completely unsatisfactory outcome in my opinion.
As it happens, service returned within about an hour so think the outage might have been planned, bringing me back to sub standard communication. Don't start me off on the IVR system either!
As far as I'm concerned the automated fault raising should be there as a safety net only, if an agent diagnoses a multiple user affecting issue then that should be escalated immediately. At least that's what I used to do.