With October already almost upon us, many of us are looking back on what we delivered over the past quarter and more importantly, looking forward to what we plan to deliver over the coming months..

I don’t know about you, but I like to think that the last few months have marked another turning point for PlusNet.. we really seem to be getting back on track. Simple things like these End of Day reports and much more involvement generally between staff and community (blogs, reports, moans and groans ‘n all), are by-products of a genuine openness and frankness that is, frankly, heartening to be involved with.

And on that thoughtful note let’s have a look at what’s been going on in and around PlusNet today:

Customer Support Centre

Today in the CSC we have been using our new Customer Details screen. This is designed to make accessing customer info a faster, more efficient process, to hopefully reduce time taken to deal with customer queries.

Top Reasons for contacting the Support Centre today:

1. Router Config 20% The usual amount of new customers unable to configure routers, or are missing the realm from their user name.
2. Email Issues 20% A lot of customers ringing up since we have started blocking email from dynamic IP addresses.
3. Sales Calls 15% Customers ringing up with sales enquiries and wanting to sign up. Definitely more interest in Home Phone Anytime+ since the 1000 minute limit was removed as this is a more competitive package.
4. Fault Updates 15% Customers ringing following emails or SMS updates from us regarding their faults.
5. Logging Faults 5% Raising new faults. No particular area or type.
   Misc Other issues - 25%

Comms

It’s been pretty quiet in all things Comms today; or rather the desk has, with just me, Chris and Bob in today. I’ve been mainly occupying myself with a number of BT faults that I’ve been working on as well as attending a couple of meetings and doing my normal forum work.

Bob’s been spending the majority of his day working on all things email, whereas Chris has been writing some training material amongst his normal day to day work.

Networks

Hi I’m Russ an operations engineer in the networks department, as far as Mondays go today was rather quiet.

I’m currently working on refining the spam blocking calls for the incoming email core, this involves adding various email servers to the white-list, these servers generally have DNS entries that make them either appear as dynamic IP’s or do not conform to mail server naming conventions.

I have been working through 22 servers’ logs using various scripts to extract and evaluate servers that may have been falsely classed as dynamic. These servers’ IP addresses are then injected in the MySQL database that controls the access lists.

We had a full operations team compliment in today - so plenty of customer issues have been actioned. Today’s entertainment was at the expense of Simon one of our senior engineers, he is sporting what looks like a premature red nose day.

Finance

Well it’s been a busy start to the week already, we still have 1 person on holiday, the rest of us have completed 57 tickets. Kate has been completing Payroll (hooray! Pay Day just around the corner). Fiona has sent letters to customers regarding expired credit card details.

Monday is curry day in the canteen and I have been reliably informed that today was the BEST ever - gutted as I have started yet another diet today!

Marketing

This week we’ve been mostly preparing for activities coming up this week… Tomorrow we’ll be sending an email about Broadband Your Way Pro. Later this week we’ll be changing the Force9 and Free-Online websites in the final changes to the “one portal” work that begun all those weeks ago.

Product

Another busy Product’s Monday occurred as follows:

All the usual Monday reporting and associated stuff was completed. We started a Domain name pricing and product review (Although this is very early stages and not due to be complete until the end of next quarter).

We held a Traffic Management meeting to review network performance and identify any current trends or events that will require changes to the platform. There were some minor points identified and we are monitoring performance closely this week after a latency spike on Gold traffic over the weekend.

Our VoIP proposal was signed off by the Finance team, but needs to be moved into the development lifecycle before it can be announced fully.

So, some saying it felt busy and some not so.. For me and the rest of the online production team it’s been the usual hectic start to the week and now it’s well past my home time so here’s PlusNet’s PJ, signing off.

Pete Jackson

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This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 7:28 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.