PlusNet Community Website

The Community site is now LIVE!

Finally we’ve cast off the ‘beta’ tag and customers of PlusNet, Force9, Free-Online and Metronet can register for their community site access. Customers who registered during the beta phase should have been emailed to ensure that those early contributions were not lost.

We’ve produced a detailed FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) which explains why the community site has been launched, what’s in it for our customers, and what further developments we are planning for the community site.

To mark the occasion we have a forum photo competition (rules apply), with a fantastic digital camera to be won for 1st prize. We’re also planning a community site launch party once the holiday season is over and everyone has a little more spare time. We will have more details about this shortly.

We’d like to welcome everyone to the community site proper. We are really looking forward to developing the site in conjunction with all of our customers who make up this very special community.

Chris

No Comments »

Due to recent weather conditions at this time BT have implemented MBORC’s ( Matters beyond our reasonable control) across various parts of the country which is currently impacting on all faults that we deal with at this time but we expect once these have resolved to be bringing our targets back to within reasonable limits.

More…

No Comments »

A manager’s account of PlusNetters’ pulling together during the floods, to ensure that customer service (and quality of) was maintained during the hardest hours of many people’s lives.

Melise Jones, Head of Network Operations, gives us a timeline of how we as a business reacted through a period of increased pressure in June 2007 and how we managed to keep the business ticking over with very little customer impact.

Read More on The Comms Team Blog…

No Comments »

A manager’s account of PlusNetters’ pulling together during the floods, to ensure that customer service (and quality of) was maintained during the hardest hours of many people’s lives.

Melise Jones, Head of Network Operations, gives us a timeline of how we as a business reacted through a period of increased pressure in June 2007 and how we managed to keep the business ticking over with very little customer impact.

More…

1 Comment »

As some people may be aware the BBC will be opening up its iPlayer service for a large scale trial on Friday, details are available here. At PlusNet we’ve been taking part in the initial closed trials to ensure that the service is fully compatible with our traffic management systems.

We’ve had the iPlayer on our radar for a while and this Friday has been firmly noted on our traffic management roadmap since the launch date was announced.

We are pleased to report that no problems were seen using the iPlayer on our network. For those that don’t know the iPlayer allows people in the UK to watch BBC programmes from the previous 7 days. There are limitations, it currently only works on Windows XP for example; Mac and Vista versions are planned for a later date. This has stirred up some controversy as can be seen here. More…

11 Comments »

We are pleased to announce that the changes to move the Community Site over to new hardware have completed successfully. This means that we now have a high level of resiliency on Community and are approaching the time to bring the site out of beta!

You can find the planned maintenance post for the work today here:-

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1185270630.htm

Please let us know if you spot any problems, issues or bugs at this link:-

http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php?board=13.0

Kind Regards,

Chris Parr

2 Comments »

Nokia, the largest (by market share) mobile phone manufacturer, has announced its purchase of Twango.

Twango offers online photo and video sharing capabilities. Nokia plans to integrate the service into its mobiles. Some of the new services will be free whereas others will be paid for subscriptions / pay per use. Is this a result of the Apple iPhone launch (over 600,000 sold in a week at a profit of over $250m for Apple alone) and simply a “me too” knee jerk or do they really have along term plan to bring the mobile internet up to the 21st century (like the industry promised with WAP and 3G).

Only time will tell.

regards

Dean

No Comments »

The latest figures out on the sales of Xbox & Wii games consoles, show the two platforms nearly neck and neck at 9.4m for the Wii and 10.1m for the XBox. What’s interesting about these numbers though is that it took Nintendo 1/2 of the time to get there than Microsoft.

Where will it end up though? Industry experts are expecting the Wii to overtake the XBox around Christmas time. But does it really matter? After all, competition is good for eveyone (especially the consumer - Sony have started to drop the price of their PS3 due to “poor” sales figures)

The Wii has caught the imagination of kids (big and small alike), the XBox & PS3 are for the “serious” gamer.

Personally, I think they all have their place and they will do just fine in their own way - but it will create a whole host of problems going forward with regard to the “living room” entertainment system if they all don’t start to adopt more open platforms to allow content to get to and from the devices more easily. For example, I don’t want to be locked into one proprietary device to view my photo’s / video’s over the network onto my screen.

Me, I’m not a gamer (by any stretch of the imagination) but I bought the Wii because its great when you have 3 young children in the house on a rainy day. All they have to do now is make Zelda easier for me

regards
Dean

1 Comment »

Following the Webmail Incident in May, we withdrew our @mail Webmail solution and implemented SquirrelMail as a temporary solution. We recently began the process of reviewing alternative Webmail applications and in our investigation into many of them we were led back to thoughts of “Squirrelmail can do this, Squirrelmail does that better” etc…

So, we’ve been scratching our heads. We know that SquirrelMail doesn’t exactly look fantastic, but it certainly is a great performing, powerful Webmail client. It does what it says on the tin and it’s fairly easy to use too (albeit with its little kinks). The ability to change the theme and display preferences make it bearable with regards to looks also. In fact, many customers have commented on how refreshing SquirrelMail is to use.

With that in mind, we’d like to see what you guys think – in general. Now, we know we can’t please everyone without offering every Webmail client under the sun – and that certainly isn’t possible. What we would like to do is provide a Webmail service that meets the needs of our customers, performs well, is scaleable, functional and, above all, is secure.

What we want to know then, is - should we consider keeping SquirrelMail going forwards? What would you guys need to make SquirrelMail work for you? What functionality is lacking? What ‘extras’ would you like? How could we improve it? Do you like SquirrelMail? Do you really dislike SquirrelMail, if so - why? Should we dismiss it entirely? Do we need to make it look nicer? Is a nice ‘skin’ all it needs?

Now, this is not a decision to stick with SquirrelMail. Nor is it a “U-turn” on what we’ve previously said. As I’ve said above, we’re looking at all the options available to us, and having used SquirrelMail for a couple of months we’ve seen it as a real strong contender amongst Webmail clients… and one that could provide us with a permanent solution going forward. We just want to get you guys involved and see what you think.

Do let us know. You can contribute to the forum thread here!

2 Comments »

Here it is, July’s Customer Satisfaction and Customer Support Centre stats.

This month the Overall Customer Service rating is 54.5% compared to 63% from last month. This score counts customers who indicated that they were either “Very” or “Extremely” satisfied. This result is from the survey that was conducted in June, and may have been influenced by a number of factors including the floods and the spam issue.

The recent floods which affected much of Yorkshire caused a significant increase in broadband faults and contacts to our support centre. BT declared the situation as a matter beyond their reasonable control which resulted in some faults taking longer to resolve than normal

Extra calls to our support centre as a result of a general increase in spam has caused the Call Answer Rate to slip slightly over the last month, as well as the “First Time Fix” measure. Unfortunately, due to the nature of unsolicited email, First-Time-Fix is not generally possible so we expected this to slip slightly. We are continuing to work hard on the issue of spam with a series of initiatives going forwards. We are keeping customers informed with regular updates as to what we’re doing right here on the Community Site.

Ofcom complaints for this month are at 15. We expect it to level off at around 10 - 15 per month.

Looking at the bigger picture we’re now in a much better position than this time last year. Our recent award from uSwitch is testament to the continued hard work and customer focus of all PlusNetters.

Click here to download the Presentation in full

You can view last week’s Top CSC Issues on the CSC Blog.

Liam Martin
PlusNet Comms Team

No Comments »