PlusNet Community Website

… even the highways agency are at it now!

Photo taken by me on the M42 around Birmingham where they have “Active Traffic Management” in place. Always makes me chuckle - thought it was worth sharing

I also like the references to “Variable Speed Limits Ahead” and “Congestion, slow down”.

More info on this : http://www.roadtraffic-technology.com/projects/m42/

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But not everyone…

James: Mon-Fri 9-6 & Sat 10-7 (on call Mon-Sun 7am-11pm)

Mand: Mon-Fri: 8-5

Tommo: Mon-Thurs & Sun: 1:30-7 & 9-12

Liam: Tues 2-6, Weds-Fri: 9-6

Bob: Thurs-Fri: 9-6

Sam: Thurs & Fri: 8-5

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A big congrats to Colin Ogilvie for his first early morning rollout. Priority Problems on the Portal, a project Colin has run with and been working (very hard!) on since he started, is now live on the Portals. You can now see which Priority (P1) problems we’re currently working on, with comments directly from the developers / engineers who are investigating, fixing, and testing!

Check it out here :

http://www.plus.net/support/service/problems/index.php

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Liam posted the following Service Status post on Tuesday warning customers that there was going to be maintenance on the portal on Thursday morning. This maintenance is the rollout slot for ‘Priority Problems on the Portal’ - meaning that we will be starting to use it from tomorrow…. Unfortunately, from my point of view, it’s annoying as it means I need to be in the office at 0230 to do the rollout, although Cam is joining me, as is QA.

It will be interesting to see both Internal (our Problem Tool is changing) and External (customers viewing the portal tool) feedback on the support pages when it rolls live.

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We mentioned in our Plans for 2007 that we were going to deliver dedicated support for Business customers. Well, it’s now becoming a reality. We’re pleased to confirm that we have launched the first phase of our dedicated Business Support team in the Customer Support Centre.

All tickets raised on Business customers accounts are now routed directly to the Business Support team from Monday - Saturday 8am - 8pm. Calls to our Business support number also route to this team during these times. Outside of these hours, calls and tickets from Business customers are dealt with by our usual Customer Support Teams (24 hours a day, 7 days a week).

We recognise that Businesses often have a more urgent need for Customer Support and prefer a more personalised service. This new service demonstrates our commitment to providing high quality support to all our customers. We are now in a position where we can launch a seperate support team whilst still maintaining the consistently improving, high-quality support to Residential customers too!

E-Mails are being sent to Business customers over the course of the next couple of weeks to advise them of the new dedicated team available to them and we’ll be closely monitoring the stats to ensure the Service Levels and quality offered to both Residential and Business customers a like continues to improve.

We’ll be sharing some of these stats with you over the course of the next few weeks and months.  If you have any questions, do visit our Discussion Forums.

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Coverage this week :-

James:
Back with a vengeance! Monday to Friday (9 - 6)

Liam:
Monday to Friday (9 - 6)

Mand:
Tuesday to Friday (8 - 5)

Bobby P:
Monday to Wednesday (9 - 6) (Holiday Thurs + Fri / Birthday Saturday )

Tommo:
Monday to Wednesday & Saturday / Sunday (split shift, 1:30-7pm & 9-12pm)

Sam:
Monday to Friday (8 - 5) (on secondment)

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The following is reposted from our Internal Forum about a change we’ve just rolled out to our Online Support Content.

Findability - how we’re making our support pages easier for customers to find!

Today we rolled out an enhancement to some of our support pages that will help make sure customers have a better chance of finding the information they need from our online support.

Check out the articles in the Broadband Section to see the following changes.

• Articles will have a class which is colour coded, giving customers a cue to the subject of the page.
• There are keywords. Soon we hope to have these linked to a menu page contain an index of all other articles that share the same keyword. Cool or what?
• Related links on the right hand menu - this should really help us connect related support content together. As we roll out the other support sections we’ll be open to suggestions on how we can improve which other articles we link to.
• Save this page options for keeping our support content in ever easier reach of the customer.Check out an example - Broadband Connection SettingsOver the next few weeks we will be rolling out the other support sections, making tweaks and improvements. As always we’re always happy to hear your ideas about how we can make it better.

Mark
Online Support Team

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Firstly, congratulations to Cam and co. for finally getting sign-up rolled - in the short time I’ve been with PlusNet, I’ve seen the dedication and the hours that Cam, the two Nigel’s and Ian have been putting in with trying to get it bug free and ready to roll.

Priority Problems on the Portal is now officially in Beta testing. Although the testing only really kicked off this afternoon due to technical problems, there’s already been some bugs found. Fortunately, some of them weren’t mine (technically :)) but some of them were, so I’m guessing I’ll be spending the next few days bug fixing…

We hope that customers will appreciate this additional view in to our business. However, we do hope that people will bear in mind that information presented in the problem pages may be of a technical nature, or involve some items that customers may not understand.

If this is the case, we would encourage people to visit either the Portal forums or the PlusNet Usergroup where the staff, or other forum users, will be able to provide further definitions etc.

We are still hoping to roll this out on the 22nd, but that date may be subject to change due to circumstances out of our control.

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Finally, after a couple of false starts, the new signup project has gone live this morning! The roll-out procedure which we had in place meant that the failed attempts were not customer affecting and allowed us to find out what went wrong so we could put them right.

The roll-out this morning went very smoothly, each stage we checked and re-checked before going onto the next stage.

This has been an excellent achievement considering the painful progress to get here. Whilst there have been issues, each has been something that has taught us something and improved processes both in development and for our platform.

I haven’t had time to create some examples of how the new framework works - these will have to wait until one of my next posts! But the framework now allows us to deliver better applications and you should start seeing some more value add items using this in the coming months.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone else in the team who helped delivered this - from across the company people have put in an amazing amount of time, energy and commitment to delivering this and it is that teamwork which makes PlusNet such a special place to work. I am sure that if this was another company this project would have either been canned at the first issue or would have not been able to deliver any of the items anyway to be able to do it.

Now, how do we make it better . . . .

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James: On holiday/asleep

Liam: Monday to Friday (9-6)

Mandy: Monday to Friday (8-5)

Bobby P: Monday to Friday (9-6)

Tommo: Monday to Thursday & Sunday (split shift, 1:30-7pm & 9-12)

Sam: Monday to Friday (8-5) (on secondment)

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