Well firstly apologies for the late posting of the End of Day today, nope we aren’t missing a day, Friday’s will be here as normal. More…
Back at the beginning of July, we discovered the Community Site had been nominated for the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards. Unfortunately, we weren’t successful in winning the award, but consider it a privilege to have made it to the shortlist, beating the likes of the Google Blog.
Well done to the winner, Steve Clayton: Geek in Disguise.
Hi! A quick introduction first, since I’ve not posted before. My name’s Peter, and I’ve been working at Plusnet for about a year and a half now. I started in the CSC as a Technical Support Analyst, before moving to the newly created Faults Team. I’m a southerner by birth, but I’ve lived in Sheffield since 2001 and feel more at home here than anywhere else.
The Faults Team has been operational for around 4 months now. The idea was to create a hotbed of faults related knowledge, and to make managing the faults workload more effective. That’s not to say that we’re keeping ourselves divided from the rest of the CSC, or behaving like some kind of elite; we’ve had a steady stream of secondments sitting with us, learning how to deal with faults correctly, and we sit in the same room, and are always ready to help out our colleagues.
Anyway, back to the survey. This survey is sent to customers after their fault is closed, to give us an idea how they feel we’ve handled their fault. The questions cover a wide range of aspects, such as whether they received SMS updates, or how well they thought we understood the issue. We analyse the results each quarter. Brad posted the last update in May; how have we done since then?
Last quarter’s headline results first then:
Followed by the same results for the latest survey:
So some things have improved, and some have not. We’re clearly doing better at keeping customers informed by SMS. The new 2-way SMS system works a treat, and has now become an integral part of how we keep in touch with customers when they have a fault. The overall proportion of people who were satisfied with the way we handled their fault is slightly down though, so there’s clearly still some work to do. Having said that, the proportion of people who said they were dissatisfied, has not changed. We also appear to be doing better at understanding the customer’s issue, and communicating our diagnosis to them.
When looking at the results of the survey, another statistic jumped out at me. Only 34% of faults were raised online via the Broadband Faults Checker this quarter, the rest were raised by phoning the CSC. This is down 6% on last quarter – quite a large shift. Obviously not everyone has the luxury of being able to get to the online Faults Checker, but we prefer it when they do, as they do not need to wait in the call queue to speak with us. The surveys show that of the customers who called to raise their fault, 42% then tracked their fault online; 84% of people who raised their fault in the Member Centre, tracked their fault there too. Customers who raised their fault online, were generally less impressed with the fault raising process, but more satisfied with the response they received. Of the 40 speed faults in the survey, only 9 were raised by phone. This seems to show that CSC agents are becoming better at diagnosing and fixing speed related issues over the phone, making a speed fault unnecessary.
A word regarding fault updates. We’ve been trying for a while to find the ideal balance between not updating customers enough, and wasting too much time providing pointless updates, and getting behind with the workload. The wider use of SMS is definitely helping in this area. In the past we tried calling customers every 24 hours, whether there was an update or not. This proved unmanageable, and unnecessary. Our current ethos is to provide SMS updates wherever possible, and make sure customers without SMS capability are kept updated by phone. We always phone when we need some information from a customer, such as engineer appointment times. Is this the right balance? I welcome your comments below.
One of our goals for next quarter is to continue to increase the proportion of customers kept updated by SMS. According to OFCOM, in 2007 there were 122.6 active mobile connections per 100 people in the UK. The percentage of people without a mobile is low, so we need to keep pushing SMS whenever we can.
We also want to review the wording of messages we send out, to make sure they are as relevant and clear as possible. We need to increase the awareness of our 0808 backup dial-up facility too, as can be a lifeline for those stuck with no connection for a while.
Finally, we will be continuing to take secondments from the rest of the CSC, to help these agents gain a better understanding of the faults process (and so we can pinch them when we’re really busy).
There is something else starting soon, which from a faults perspective is quite exciting……. but I can’t tell you about it yet!
Thanks for reading, please feel free to post any questions or comments below.
Part 2 of an interview with Ian Wild of the Plusnet products team, talking about his career at Plusnet and how the products team operates
Until today, the only way I could get my personal laptop online when at the office was by using my mobile phone as a modem and and using its data connection. It seemed kinda funny that I was sat in the head office of a major ISP and I couldn’t even get wifi access! Anyway we got it working properly today so I can be more mobile - yay! More…
I received a Tweet yesterday afternoon that led me to to a recent article over on the Mozilla Labs blog announcing the launch of a new Firefox Extension prototype called ‘Ubiquity’.
I installed and had a play around with Ubiquity last night and I have to admit it oozes potential. Even in it’s current manifestation it comes across as being pretty special.
What Ubiquity does is to bring together a wealth of other web resources and allows you to interact with them all from a single command line interface that you invoke by hitting the CTRL/Option and Space keys.
What this lets you do is call on multiple applications without actually having to physically visit the website of the resource you’re attempting to use.
Take for example this blog article. Using Ubiquity (and without ever moving away from this page), I could shorten the URL of the web address, post it to my Twitter feed, email it to a colleague using Gmail, and submit the article to Digg. More…
What day is it? I’m confused… what with Bank Holiday Monday, and me being doing two half days over Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’ve lost all track of what day it is. Thankfully, my computer tells me it’s Wednesday, so I guess that means it is… Ah well, two days til Friday 
Part 1 of an interview with Ian Wild of the Plusnet products team, talking about his career at Plusnet and how the products team operates
*zooooom!*. Did you see it? It’s gone already! The last bank holiday before Christmas. Cripes!
Back to work for everyone in Plusnet then. See what they got up to:
Another week draws to a close and so it’s time for the final end of day for this week. We also have the bank holiday this week and a little bit of research we’ve seen suggests that around two thirds of people will be staying home over the weekend because of a combination of the current economic climate, the weather forecast and fuel prices. All in all means we’ll be keeping a close eye on the network so that everything performs for those that decide to go online. More…
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