We are pleased to announce that we have now activated the first segment of our sixth 622Mbps Central Pipe.
The new capacity has been activated in line with the current budget and in response to our recent Broadband Your Way product launch as well for projected growth in signups and to support existing customers moving to the new products.
When new capacity is added to the network, it takes time for the network to balance and for a representative proportion of the customer base to connect to the new segment. In order to speed up this process and help balance the platform to give the most benefit to customers, it may be necessary for us to temporarily disconnect a number of customers from the network. Should we take the decision to do this we will announce further details as a planned maintenance notice otherwise it may take up to a week for the new segment to be balanced.
We frequently review our plans for the purchase of additional capacity and will continue to do this based on projected customer numbers.
Hi, my name is Brad Knights-Toomer and I am one of the Technical Support Analysts here at Plusnet. As we are split into three teams, we work 2 early shifts (7am - 4pm), 2 late shifts (2pm - 11pm) and have 2 days off. This is the typical shift pattern over 6 days and it allows for as many analysts in for the peak periods of the day.
I am going to write about a typical early shift on Monday 18th June.
6:30am - This is the time when I get into work. It is slightly early but it does give me time to look through the various events that have been occurring the past two days when I have been off. I also take time to set everything up ready for the day ahead. The rest of the team come in between 6:15am and 7am for a 7am start.
7:00am - We find out what workflow (calls, tickets, faults, other) we are working today, I am doing the Billing pool until 9am and then on calls so should expect to answer around 50 calls today. The Billing pool involves Support Tickets where customers have normally asked for a MAC key but some outstanding payments are due. If the customer has remained with us then there is no need to take this payment but if the customer has left, we have to contact the customer regarding this. Don’t worry, we don’t contact customers before 9am 
8:00am - Between now and 9:00am, the rest of the business start coming in to work. Everything seems to have gone as normal so far this morning, we have taken quite a few calls which is usual for a Monday morning.
9:30am - Busy as usual, we have entered the peak time for a Monday morning. Calls have been coming in quick but they do not have any similar pattern to them. They are the usual calls, fault raising, email setup, fault updates and failed billing. Unfortunately our Call View screen has gone down so I cannot see how many customers are in the queue but I do expect it to be around 5 - 10.
9:45am - The call queue has shot up to 16 customers. Everyone we have here is busy trying to get this wait time down. Still no pattern to calls emerging.
10:30am - It has been a busy morning so far! 20 calls in queue. Most of the calls today have been either raising faults or faults updates. We are currently looking into ways to improve this area so customers will not need to call for updates as often.
11:45am - It seems to be the peak time of year for house moves as we have had a lot of customers ringing to check the status of their Broadband house move orders. The call queue has gone down as well to 7 customers with a wait time of around 7 minutes. I fully expect this number to jump up as customers start to go on their lunch breaks from work and ring us up.
12:30pm - As predicted, the call queue has shot up again with customers using some of their lunch break to chase up Broadband issues.
1:30pm - The call queue has come right down now, mostly due to more customers being back at work. Also within the next 30 minutes, agents on the next team will start to come in to work. This will mean double the amount of agents answering the phone so there should not be as long a wait in the queue. Currently so far the average wait time is 3 minutes 49 seconds, which is not too bad considering we have taken over 600 calls already. As you can expect, the call centre is bustling with busy agents taking calls, answering tickets, fixing faults, placing orders, retaining customers, and communicating to customers via the forums.
2:10pm - Both teams are in now and answering calls. The call queue has gone down to zero so any customers would be able to get straight through. During 2pm and 4pm, it is the best time to call as we do have double the amount of staff on to take calls. By now, we have taken over 700 calls which is around normal for the first day of the week. As there are no calls in the queue, there is another opportunity to answer customer questions raised in the Help Assistant. There are about 170 Questions in the ticket pool which we will go through. This should be reduced throughout the afternoon and mostly cleared by our Nights Staff.
3:10pm - Into my last hour of the shift. It has gone very quick today due to how busy it has been. So far today, we have taken over 850 calls and the average wait time is down to 3 minutes and 15 seconds. Everyone has been right on key today so things have gone smoothly, which is always a good thing!
4:05pm - The shift is over for me now. It has been very very busy today, myself taking 46 calls between 9am - 4pm and answering over 60 tickets. All in all, the total calls taken so far is just under 1000 which is a nice busy day for everyone! It has been a good day and it feels good to help customers with their Broadband. As my team mates and I get ready to go home and relax, the rest of the business are still plowing on with their work. The average call wait today has been 3 minutes and a couple of seconds, which has decreased throughout.
I hope this blog has been insightful and given you an idea of what goes on in a typical shift.
Brad
All completed with no spotted problems.
There will be a brief (5 - 10 min) period of downtime between 0000 and 0100 on Wednesday 20th June to facilitate a code upgrade to the software powering the website.Sorry for any inconvenience
It’s official! We’ve been nominated in the Macworld Awards 2007 for “Best Mac-Friendly ISP”. A few months back we introduced dedicated Mac training for all our Customer Service and Technical Support Analysts. In addition, we launched a Dedicated Mac Support section.
We mentioned this in a PlusNet newsletter - and it seems customers have been impressed! Results on June 28th! Good luck to all nominees.
Inspired by meebo’s JavaScript Riddle blog post, here is another bit of weirdness I just came across. I’ve initialised the variable foo to some value and executing these statements gives these results:
>>> foo == false
false
>>> !foo
true
The first line implies that since foo isn’t false, then it must be true (every value in JavaScript is either true or false). But if not foo is true, then foo must be false! However the really weird bit is:
>>> foo == foo
false
What?! foo isn’t equal to itself? At this point you’ll either know the answer or you’ll be throwing your hands up in the air and cursing JavaScript for not making any sense. For those of you in the latter category, the answer is that foo is the special value NaN which stands for “Not a Number”. Attempting to equate NaN to anything, even itself, always returns false!
If you still think that JavaScript is nuts, go and read these articles by Douglas Crockford. It’s actually quite a cool language.
Pipex are currently the talk of the ISP market with Tiscali showing increased interest in a potential sale. The Register reports on the deal being potentially announced within the coming weeks, rather than months. However, this will not be a total sale of Pipex and its cluster of ISPs, with Pipex having bought Freedom2surf, Nildram, Toucan and Bulldog over the last few years. The suggestions are that this will only take into consideration Pipex’s residential customers, with their business services and domain registrations via 123reg remaining as they are.
Over the last couple of year especially, there has been a large aspect of ISP consolidation, with the larger ISPs growing larger and the smaller companies having to fight harder and harder to retain their customer numbers by offering niche services, superior customer services and value additions to existing services. ISPs such as PlusNet, Metronet, Freedom2Surf, AOL amongst others have been unable to avoid the temptation of offers from the likes of BT, Carphone Warehouse and O2 (Telefonica owned).
Over the last 12 months Pipex have made a conserted effort to become a Tier 1 ISP along with the likes of BT, Tiscali, Sky with reasonable sucess via consolidation of other brands. This move by Tiscali sees the second of the Tier 1 takeovers, with Carphone Warehouse having acquired AOL last year after the American owned company decided to ditch its UK brand. It would also add speculation to the thought that Tiscali are struggling to keep up with BT, Sky and TalkTalk without acquisition. Obviously BT would naturally grow under the theory that they would expect large levels of signups based on the familiarity that comes with a BT phoneline. Then you have Sky and TalkTalk selling unlimited* free* (terms apply) broadband services. Tiscali do gain a number of customers via TV marketing along with Dell machines coming with Tiscali dial software preinstalled, as do other companies.
There have been recent suggestions that Pipex were starting to flounder, having made a number of staff redundant after their year end financial results were below the expected par, which was blamed on debt incurred from acquisitions. They also appear to have been somewhat clutching at straws having recently offered 6 months free service on their 18 month contracts and attempting to have a go at the free broadband game. The long and short has to be that they simply don’t have the fanancial backing of the likes of Sky and Carphone Warehouse, which suggests that this is merely a ploy to stop the rot as it were.
Here at PlusNet we continue to aim to be the best value ISP in the country. Free broadband cannot last forever. The relevant sums behind that simply state that it would be impossible for a sustained “free” service and one would expect the various deals surrounding the myth to slowly disperse until they are all withdrawn. We believe in the theory that you get what you pay for, which many will appreciate and we continue to offer a well priced service that places Wholesale costs in a similar level to those that our customers are able to gain from us. PlusNet’s open and honest philosophy allows us to discuss with our customers how we price our services and ensure that they are able to gain timely updates on all the news about the services that we supply and openly discuss industry news with those that have an interest.
So, will this be an end for the UK based Hoff? It doers look rather likely from all the speculation that has been seen recently. Still, we should all know in a month or so. It’ll be the next in a long line of acquisitions. We could well be in a place 12-24 months down the line when only the Tier 1 ISPs exist, having swallowed up the remainder of the market.
Hello to all CSC Blog readers, may I take this opportunity to introduce myself to you all, for those of you who don’t already know me I am currently Head of the CSC here at PlusNet and have been for the last 4 years. Quality of support is key to what we do, for me speed of answer and response is important but offering good support when customers do contact us is equally if not more important, so I wanted to give you an insight into the results we are currently seeing and some of the things we are doing. We currently measure the quality of support in various different ways.
TSM (Technical Shift Manager) remote monitoring
TSMs are tasked with completing a number of quality assessments on individuals within their team, at least 4 on a daily basis. It is their responsibility to ensure that there is a 50/50 split between tickets and calls. We use slightly different criteria for each work stream, however the required levels on each is 85%. You may ask why this isn’t 100% and this is due to the fact that the final 15% is an over and above score, covering things such as excellent empathy, understanding etc. The process is for the TSM to complete the assessment and then feedback the results to the individual. This includes both areas in which the individual achieved or over achieved and areas in which they need to focus and the support they will be given to improve. This then forms the basis for objectives for the next month. TSMs complete over 200 of these types of measures on a monthly basis and this forms part of their objectives.
TSM (Technical Shift Manager) Side By Side coaching
On a weekly basis TSMs are tasked with spending 4 hours per week on this activity, if their team members are fairly new then they will concentrate on these individuals and they will do more than the required amount. This activity involves the TSM sitting with the individual analyst, listening to calls and observing tickets and then providing immediate feedback and support on both technical areas for improvement and soft skills. In this instance the results are not necessarily documented unless there is a need for future actions and activities to be captured and followed up on.
I am conscious that these are all internally generated results and feel it is important to ensure we have a balanced overview and perspective of the support we offer. Therefore we also collate and review customer feedback on tickets, faults and calls.
Customer feedback on calls
Every 3rd call where the phone system can match the CLI (phone number) of the caller with an account in our database, we send out a link, via email to a survey to assess the quality of the support. This is collated on a monthly basis by the Comms team; previously this was collated by the TSMs. The results are published to the business with a list of issues and actions based upon the results. This then forms part of the operational plan for the coming month/s. I have attached below the overall results of the survey for those of you that are interested in looking at this and showing the progressive improvements we have made over the last few months, you need to bear in mind, that last month we changed the measures from 4 options to 8, this is why the graph may seem confusing at first glance. Our target is to ensure that over 50% of all rating are in the top 2 categories, very satisfied and extremely satisfied.
Customer feedback on tickets
Every time a customer closes a ticket we ask them to rate the level of the support they have received, this is currently rated with 3 faces, smiley, neutral and sad. This is reviewed daily by the late TSM, who reviews all “sad” ratings, gives feedback and support to the analyst where this is required and if it is necessary contacting the customer to take ownership of the issue. Again you can find graph below detailing the responses we have had. It is interesting to note that some “sad” face ratings are due to the customer not liking our answers, in these circumstances the answer is correct and there is nothing else we could have done, i.e. wording this differently etc. As you can see this again shows very positive results
Customer feedback on Faults
We recently launched beta phase of feedback when customer faults are closed. This will be used to measure our performance in this area. We are currently in the process of collating this. Once this has been collated we will be using this to review and amend the processes and procedures and work to improve the customer experience on faults in general.
Future developments
We are currently working on a “Mystery shopper” assessment, which we will use for key processes and procedures and will again help us to audit and improve processes and procedures and measure the quality of the support in these areas. Simon, who is a TSM within the dept has this has one of his objectives, so watch this space for further updates. We have in the past and will continue to maintain the focus we have on the quality of support in all workflows, there will be times when we drop the ball and where new starters who are in “learn” mode will make mistakes, however I hope you can see that we are working to minimize this, we still have areas for improvement and we will be driving this onwards and upwards throughout the Year.
Over the last few months, but especially within the last few weeks, we’ve seen an increase in calls from customers surprised to have found that their broadband has suddenly stopped working. Their modems appear to remain ‘in-synch’ with the exchange, but their username and password is rejected when they attempt to connect.
Following the normal procedures for ‘No Authentication’ faults, we quickly identified that all these customers’ assets were no longer owned by ourselves in BT’s systems. Hmm… Strange, we thought, since none of these customers had requested to migrate away or cease their service with us.
After delving deeper into each individual case we found a single common factor - that the customer had opted to move their line rental over to Carphone Warehouse (TalkTalk).
It would appear, you see, that in areas where TalkTalk have an unbundled exchange, they can move your home phone AND your broadband over to their equipment (fully unbundled) without a MAC key or any authorisation from the customer. So, even if you sign up to only move your home phone service to TalkTalk, they may just swindle you out of your trusty broadband connection - forcing you to take their option.
This doesn’t appear to be isolated to their ‘free broadband‘ option either. Several of our customers who have contacted us had not signed up to the more expensive TalkTalk plan that includes broadband.
Naturally, these customers were surprised to hear what has happened and were most upset at what TalkTalk had done. So we took a delve into their Ts and Cs. Indeed, they do claim (in their Ts and Cs) that switching your home phone service to TalkTalk does give them the right to nab your broadband too.
They say :
1.23.2 you will no longer be able to use Broadband or Line Rental Services from other providers. We will not be liable for any charges which may arise as a result of the termination of your contract with your existing providers for those services;
However, they also say :
“1.22 Unless you have agreed previously to take our Broadband Service, we will seek your express consent before transferring you to our LLU network if you take a broadband service from another provider on the same telephone line at the time of transfer.”
Strangely, none of our customers recalled ever opting to take the TalkTalk Broadband service. Nor did any of them remember being contacted for “express consent” to have their broadband service stolen away from them. If they had, why would they be calling us confused over why they cannot connect?
The numbers aren’t small either. This is something we’ve been tracking internally for quite some time and dozens of customers have been affected by this. And if it’s happening to our customers, other ISPs must surely be seeing the same thing.
Of course, we do lose some customers who do genuinely wish to leave and take up service with TalkTalk. For these customers, TalkTalk’s assumption that everyone in the world wants their ‘free broadband’ offer is less of an inconvenience. Good job, eh? But I can’t personally believe, in this day and age, that Ofcom are allowing this to happen without any consumer-driven processes (i.e. the MAC key process) to take place.
It’s no wonder their customer numbers are ‘soaring’ when they’re getting them this easily!
It doesn’t appear to stop there either. Over the last few days, we’ve received calls from customers who had been told they could signup to TalkTalk and have TalkTalk “take care of everything”. Surprised that we were still billing them, after TalkTalk had switched them (without a MAC key!) they were told by TalkTalk’s sales staff that they would arrange the cancellation with us.
To put this to the test and see if this customer’s unbelievable statement was true, I lifted to handset and called their sales team with a few genuine enquiries. I decided to call a few times, to see if the story changed. Indeed it did.
1st Call – Woman – The woman advised me that I could signup today, and TalkTalk would take care of everything. She said that they would move me over without requiring a MAC key, and that they would deal with the cancellation with my current provider on my behalf - so I’d have nothing to worry about. Sit back – relax!
2nd Call – Gentleman – I was told that I could signup to TalkTalk right now, and that I would not need a MAC key to do so. However, on the day my broadband is switched on, I might like to call my current provider “as a courtesy” just to let them know I’ve switched!
3rd Call – Gentleman – A particularly ‘pushy’ salesman on this occasion. I was told that my landline would switchover first (within a few days) then Broadband would follow in a few weeks (once I’m firmly in my 18month contract). At which point, he said I would need to get a MAC key from my current provider. When I was reluctant to signup there and then he was particularly rude and ended the call.
All of these whom I spoke to were particularly keen to bag a sale right now. The third one even began placing the order for me after I made it clear I was enquiring only. However, it would appear that potential customers are getting some very mixed messages from TalkTalk Sales. I just hope I don’t find myself a customer of theirs in a few days time!
Following on from the webmail incident PlusNet have added more functionality to the Manage My Mail tool.
These features are:-
- Customers can now set up a redirect to automatically blackhole an address using the redirect option
- Mailbox names can now be 1 character long, previously the minimum was 2 characters
- Increased search functionality on mailboxes and redirects, this will make it easier to find a specific mailbox
- Redirects can now be edited without losing the search/sort options currently in use
- When a mailbox is deleted customers are now warned that any associated aliases will be removed
- There is now a link back to the customer portal from webmail
- The attachment size allowed in webmail has been increased from 2MB to 7MB
These activities are additional features to go alongside the deliverables in the Webmail Incident Report
There are still more ideas and features in the pipeline and we will update you as we have more information.
Maintenance Window:-
Wednesday 13th June, 3PM - 4PM
Service Affected:-
Community Site
Duration of expected customer impact:-
Main site: 10 minutes downtime
Forums: 1hr downtime
Detailed description of work to be performed:-
We are making some changes to the backend database tables for the blogs part of the Community Site. We are then going to be making some changes to the way permissions work within the Forum Software. This will enable us to better manage things.
After the work, there should be no customer-facing changes.
Expected customer impact:-
Unable to connect to Community Site and/or forums for the duration of the maintenance window
Other Details:-
I just couldn’t resist posting this in the format of a Service Status posting
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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