Zemanta is a British/Slovenian startup which has developed a plugin for Wordpress to suggest relevant links, pictures, and tags by analysing the content of a new blog post before it is published. Zemanta was one of the 6 winners of SeedCamp last year and recently announced a $1.5M seed round so someone clearly believes in their product. More…
Earlier this month Critical Path (whom some will remember from some of our early anti-spam trials), announced the sale of certain assets of its SuperNews Usenet access business, including its software, commercial customer base, trade names and other elements of goodwill, to Giganews, an industry leader in Usenet newsgroup services.
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Some time ago we introduced the facility to send customers text messages with ticket updates. This has been received very well by customers, and helps us to communicate much more effectively with customers who are having connection issues and such like.
Today sees the introduction of the second phase of our SMS project, which enables customers to reply by text to our responses, and have these responses added to the current open ticket.
After the rather poor turnout yesterday on the EOD front, today has gone a little…. well.. obfuscated?
Continue reading to work out what I’m going on about. You might have to do a little bit homework to work out what’s going on here.
Back after a break and it’s happened again – almost everyone’s ‘forgotten’ to do their end of day. This happened last time we had a holiday. Rest assured I’ll be having ‘words’ with the culprits.
Good afternoon all.
With all the beavering we have been doing in the Customer Support Centre (CSC) recently to improve the customer experience, it has been hard to get any reports out to you on different areas that may interest you. With all the awards going around I thought this would be an ideal time to give you some information regarding the volumes of contacts coming into our CSC against the increase in customer numbers.
As you would expect the more PlusNet customers that sign up with us, the potential for more contacts to the CSC increases. A contact is a phone call or a ticket from a customer which comes into our Sheffield CSC.
How has this affected the support centre I hear you say?
Well, not that much actually, due to the increased focus on getting problems resolved first time and offering as much online support as possible. A result of this is that the actual amount of contacts raised per customer has been on the decrease, with the stats showing on the following graph:
How have we done this?
Our CSC is always trying to give the best quality support possible and to try to resolve all issues first time and remove the requirement for anyone to call back ( ISPA and USwitch are good indicators that we are not bad at this 
). We consistently review calls and tickets coming into the support centre to ensure our staff are giving the correct information out at all times. On top of this we are always looking for other areas to improve the customer experience. Recently we have changed the way we look at faults and are now contacting all customers that have a fault logged with us and cannot connect in order to provide updates on what is happening, although this has resulted in more calls out it results in less customers calling for updates on their faults. We are also using SMS to provide short updates where we have a mobile number for the customer. We have recently introduced welcome calls where the analysts are calling customers to ensure everything is ok on activation and therefore reducing the requirement to call in to setup.
As a business we try to promote self-service so that customers do not have to wait in any queues or await responses to tickets when they can action the work themselves, and learn about their service by fixing their own issues. We are constantly working to improve the information available online through customer feedback and the smiley faces shown on every page. You may have also noticed various different flash videos showing online to help setup different aspects of our customers service such as routers and spam filters. As part of this review we looked at the confirmation page sent out to customers on signup and the information we were providing. This was changed to provide information that customers were calling in for, and therefore reduced the number of customers calling in for setup details.
Finally we are maintaining a very steady network (service status) with everyone looking to stabilise and improve areas that have caused us pain in the past and resulted in customers calling up with problems.
We send out customer surveys to our customers to gain feedback and help improve this moving forward. So if you do receive a request to complete one of these from us please do complete it so we can keep improving the service for you. You can find recent results on our blog for Customer Satisfaction and you can ask questions in our forums.
This is not the end of this we are always working to improve the way we offer support to make it as easy as possible for our customers to get the information they need or resolve any problems that they have.
Looking back over the last week as many of us head off for our Easter break, it looks quite astonishing really. Firstly last Friday we won the ISPA Awards, then on Tuesday we won 9 out of 11 categories in the uSwitch Awards; today we’ve lit up another 155Mbs of bandwidth to increase our Central Capacity and announced how we’re raising money for Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity. More…
In my monthly operational review with the Directors and the CEO, Neil Laycock asked me to get some stats together of how the community site is doing. I’ve spent a few minutes to pull some stats together showing how we are doing right now in comparison to the end of our third quarter (October – December 07).
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As part of our recent drive to raise money for Sheffield Children’s Hospital we’ve been busy rounding up the PlusNet troops to create a team of uber-athletes.
We’ve been working with a team of nutritionists, personal trainers and faith healers to ensure that we are all at the pinnacle of physical fitness for Theo’s 10k run in April.
Or maybe we’re not quite ready!
We had a visit today from Theo himself to make sure that we are giving this challenge the respect that it deserves.
For those of you reading in the local area, have a look at Theo’s 10k website for details on how to enter the race. If you don’t fancy a Sunday morning trip to Sheffield then have a look at how else you can help the charity when you sign-up to PlusNet broadband.
If you’d like to sponsor Team PlusNet and support the Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity then please visit out Justgiving page.
Now, where are my running shoes?
We have just activated an additional 155Mbps segment of central bandwidth. Customers connecting to the new segment will be terminated on the gateway pcl-ag01.
The new capacity has been activated in line with the current budget and projected growth in customer numbers.
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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