PlusNet appears to have gone a little bit twitter mad today. We’ve now got 12 people included in our Community Site twitter feed and we’ve even resurrected the PlusNet twitter account to use as an alternate communications feed.

Enough with the tweeting and on with the show!

First up, James from the CSC

Hello all, it’s definitely been that word that we can’t mention in the CSC today. However our teams within the CSC have done extremely well to combat the volumes of calls and tickets/questions being received in and responding as quickly as possible.

My team have been the main tech team covering your issues from 7am until 3.30 today and our top 5 issues of the day are as follows

1. Since the introduction of the newly improved SMS facility we have had more customers contact us today for updates on their faults using the 2 way SMS feature. It’s great to see such a useful tool being used by both our agents and customers and getting that benefit
2. Advice on email client configuration is our number 2 for the day. So I’d like to use this as an opportunity to encourage our customers to use the fantastic help and support pages available on our portal for email setup (amongst many other topics).
3. It must have been lots of people’s birthdays recently too as we have had many enquiries from people who have had new routers and needing the settings to set them up. So we have offered the advice as best as possible, even on some of the more obscure routers that we haven’t been familiar with.
4. Isn’t Spam a permanent resident in the top 5? And so as not to disappoint it makes our number 4. The recent improvements into the anti-spam services are seeing great feedback.
5. Due to the earlier P1 raised on one of our SQL servers (Rumpus) this has also led to a number of enquiries from customers checking about it. Thankfully I believe this is now resolved so everyone’s SQL databases should be ok.

For a bit of additional variety I have also collated the top 2 issues from the Customers Service and Business support teams. We normally only post the tech teams top 5 so I hope you like this.

Customer Services have been enjoying the new Spring weather with customers as lots of customers have been moving house, must be a Spring thing, so have called in advising of their new addresses and asking to arrange a house move.
Customer services deal commonly with customers calling to change billing details, or update expired debit card records. Did you know this is something that you can do online through the member centre? I would also use this as a prime time to recommend setting up a direct debit over a debit/credit card payment per month as direct debits don’t expire so you’re less likely to have a billing problem with that.

Our business support team have been busy today starting to get results back from faults that have been raised at the start of the week and then feeding them back to their business customers, and advising those customers further if any additional work needs to be done.

The second main issue that the business team have dealt with is Spam and how to combat it. So as with the tech team they have offered advice and recommended the new tools as linked too earlier.

Well that’s all form the CSC today. I’m off to watch the mighty Sheffield Wednesday stave off relegation tonight against the Pilgrims of Plymouth so wish me luck, we need it

James Nelson

Kat next, talking about what happen on Friday

Hello from Development.

The end of last week saw an eerily empty development floor at PlusNet Towers - this isn’t because we’ve all decided to go on a holiday, or a new IKEA store opened nearby… Its because we had an Off-site - a day-long event for Developers, QA and BA teams where we all could talk about the Business Roadmap.

Over the last few months our senior developers, leads and managers were looking into how we all can work smarter and continue delivering quickly whilst always providing quality products - from both developer and customer perspectives. We’ve evaluated different development strategies such as test-driven programming and agile project lifecycle approaches; we’ve re-enforced the importance of network and data security; we trialled and tested a variety of tools to make sure that we continue working efficiently; we took a step back and re-established the principles behind all of our development, such as Clarity, Adaptability and Collaboration. The off-site consisted of a series of presentations and workshops designed for sharing that knowledge with the rest of the development floor.

The day was a big success - a lot of new ideas were raised, quiz prises won, and generally everyone left feeling that they learned something new, as well as contributed to the company’s direction and success; the discussions then continued late into the night at the nearby pub

A short and sweet Marketing update

Phil struggled into the office this morning after his Friday night spinning class did more damage to his leg muscles than he expected. We had our start of week meeting to plan for the week ahead, Martyn attended a workshop about this very Community site and I’ve cracked on with planning for the LAN party that we are sponsoring later in the year. I’ve also been working on some upcoming PR and Spencer has been drawing pictures.

Last up, Bedders from Networks

Its been a usual Manic Monday today in Networks today, the breakdown is as follows:-

Bedders and Ben B - Working on upgrading our incoming mail spool storage to the latest firmware, also performing some clean up work on the very same server after the Manage My Mail rollout the other week.
Mark L - Working on investigating a network incident over the weekend and planning the work to allow one of our remote development teams secure access to our testing platform
Dunk - Housekeeping and monitoring
Rusty - Problems
Matt R - Mail and Traffic Management tickets
Dan P - tickets, abuse, a few DB changes
Gricey - Worked on the new auth DNS platform with Adey, replication is now up following a couple of recuts, built most of the packages Denis needs to get fully transparent IWF proxying working (which should fix that pesky rapidshare issue. Ed.). Just finishing kernel compile now, but all other packages are done and the compile is working, A Dell server repaired with Dell engineer
Josh - backup server autobuild testing and documentation
Michael - Problems

Bedders

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This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 5:29 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 response, or trackback from your own site.