We’re proud of our blogs and hope you find them both interesting and informative. And we’re very pleased now to have been included in Online IT Degrees’ Top 100 Blogs for the industry.

You can find us in the “Top IT Industry Company Blogs” category with the likes of Digg, DELL and the Windows 7 team – which is very nice indeed.

Our blogs are important to the way we work as a company. They allow you to see what we’re interested in, and through them we can give you our take on what’s happening in the world of ISPs and the wider Internet.

http://onlineitdegrees.org/top-100-it-industry-blogs/

Sounds too good to be true? Well it isn’t! From today it becomes a reality.

The technology behind how we manage these new routers goes by the name of TR069

Let’s go through what should happen from the moment a hardware order is placed with us.
A ‘component’ is added to your account on our systems. This contains the router model, order number and delivery address. This order will be sent along with any other hardware orders received that day as part of a batch.

After the warehouse has received this order, they’ll prepare the router to be dispatched. This now includes scanning the serial number and sending it back to us. We then record this serial number on your hardware component and also in the ACS (Auto Configuration Server).

The router is then sent to you, and once you’ve plugged it all in and it’s picked up the ADSL signal, it will authenticate on a generic username. This then connects to our ACS (Auto Configuration Server) which tells the router what username and password it needs to connect on your service. This information is pushed back to the router and it’s forced to disconnect from using the generic username and reconnect using your specific details.

That’s it all done. You should be online and able to browse.

But wait, there’s more!

Previously if you had changed your password via our website, it would mean you’d have to log back in to the router and manually update the password in there. This can be time consuming, especially if you have to look up the address and username/password for the router setup pages. Now this is changed automatically, once you’ve updated your password on our website, this information is passed back to the router (normally within a couple of minutes) and you continue to browse without problems.

We’re looking forward to this being launched and we hope you are too.

This will only apply to customers who have ordered hardware since Thursday 6th August.

If you’ve got any questions, drop a comment below and we’ll get back to you.

Our new products start at just £10 for the entry level service, perfect for the small/home office in the current climate.

For the first time ever you’ll now be able to add a Business line rental and call plan to your broadband choice from us.

So what are the new products?

The new products will have 3 broadband options, and two fixed line ‘phone options.

You can see the new product pages from the links below.

Business Broadband

Business Phone

What’s new?

Our business products now follow our recent changes in residential products, in that we have introduced geographic pricing.
This means that approximately 70% of the UK will qualify for a cheaper broadband service, due to Ofcom deregulation.

You’ll get the usual excellent service you expect from us (including dedicated business support based in Sheffield), but at a much more competitive price.

We’ve also introduced clear usage limits on the entry level products, and made the terms and conditions clearer.

You still get all the benefits you’d expect from a Plusnet Business product, including webspace, domain hosting, and VoIP. You can also tailor your broadband connection with Max Premium (ideal for a higher upload speed) and Enhanced Care (prioritised BT fault response)

What about existing customers?

If you’re an existing customer you can upgrade to the new products immediately. We know from feedback that the new products have been eagerly anticipated for a while now, and hope you’ll be very pleased with what we have come up with.

What else do I need to know?

We know there will probably be other stuff you want to know before considering the new products, so the important links are below:

Expected Speeds.
FAQ and Guides.

If you’d like to discuss the new products, or anything else, please join us over on our Community Site forums. We look forward to seeing you there.

 My Account
From here you’ve got control over nearly every aspect of your broadband service, from your contact details, domain names, email settings and addresses all the way to looking after your referrals and changing your payment details.

You can also see how much data you’ve downloaded in the View My Broadband Usage section and of course there are links to the Help & Support section of the website where you can search our Support Pages and Tutorials or, if you’re stuck, ask us a ‘Question’ in the Help Assistant.  We often refer to this as ‘raising a ticket’ and we use this instead of email for our online support.

Help Assistant

Use the Help Assistant when you have an issue or a query that doesn’t need to be resolved instantly. The great thing about the ticket wizard is that when your ticket is raised, provided you have followed the correct path the ticket will be assigned to the correct department. This means that sometimes, rather than calling and having a ticket raised by one of our CSC agents and then having them pass it on for you, your problem can actually be fixed faster if you raise a ticket.

All you need do once you’re at the Help Assistant is to select the section which relates to your query. This will narrow down the options as you go through them and if at any point you cannot find a topic under which your subject may be found there’s always a link to raise a general support ticket on the right hand side of the page.

When you start typing in a Question, you’ll notice suggestions for Support Pages that may be of help to you appearing at the bottom of the page.

Support Pages

If you have a problem or query it is always worth taking a look here first – there’s a wealth of information, from how to configure your new router right through to how to use wireshark so you can get your online game defined in our traffic management systems to improve your connection (and for the gamers amongst you maybe get you a few extra frags) – and everything in between.

Service Status

If you have any issues with your service – email, broadband phone, or even the broadband service itself – then this should be your first stop. All service affecting issues are reported here.

If your problem may be due to a known service issue we would recommend waiting for an update to this page (though of course you are welcome to raise a ticket or give us a call if you wish). You can also subscribe to the Service Status RSS feed at our Usertools website which will keep you informed. If you’re not sure what an RSS feed is you can find out here too.

Usertools

Our Usertools website also has an exchange checker, which allows you to see what the capacity is like at your local exchange as a possible cause of slow speeds (normally during the evening when most people are online).

Forums

If you have a question, a problem, a comment about the service or you just want to talk about that programme you watched last night then why not pop along to the forums? You’ll be able to get help from people who’ve been through the same kind of problems as you – most of the time in just a few minutes.

We have a staff presence on the forums as well so there will be someone there to pick up that errant support query if need be.

Webmail

If you want to send and receive your email when you’re out and about use Webmail.  Whether you’re on holiday in Spain or just at your local wifi enabled coffee shop, you’ll be able to log in and check to see if you’ve won that ebay auction or reply to let your colleagues know that you will be at that Christmas party.

What’s the background to this?
For some time the issue of child abuse images (often wrongly referred to as child porn) has been a very sensitive issue, with government and some media calling on ISPs to take action. The Register wrote a detailed article on the issue two years ago. We support the work of the IWF and like most ISPs we help fund them.

What is the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)?
For more information about the IWF, please read About the IWF and subsequent pages. We also have a Support Page about them. The IWF supply Plusnet, and several other major UK ISPs, with the Child Sexual Abuse Content URL list twice a day which we use to prevent our customers from accessing this content. The IWF also have other lists, for example criminally obscene and racist material, but we do not use these and have no plans to do so.

This blocking is designed to prevent ‘accidental and incidental’ access – no-one is in any doubt that it is not a complete solution to the problem of child abuse images on the Internet. Plusnet chose to use this IWF service as we believe it is the right thing to do for our customers. There could also be commercial risks in the future if we did not take some form of action in line with other ISPs.

How it works
When our routers receive a request for a web page, they first check the IP address of the server hosting the URL you’re trying to access. If they determine that the IP address is also used to host one of the websites on the IWF list, your request is passed to a proxy server. The diagram in this blog has been used by other blogs and media to describe how all IWF solutions work. That’s incorrect, the diagram refers specifically to Plusnet’s implementation and may well not represent other ISPs implementations.

On the proxy server, a lookup is then done and if the address you’re trying to access matches one on the list then the request is denied. If it doesn’t match, then the request will be honoured and the page you requested is delivered as normal.

A denied request is performed by sending back a TCP Reset to the customer which will be seen as a connection error page in the customers’ browser. There has been some debate in our forums (and elsewhere!) if this is the right approach. We’ll talk about that later.

This list is updated twice a day by an automated process. That means if the IWF add a URL to their list at lunchtime, by the end of the day access to that URL will be blocked on our platform automatically. We don’t view, verify or approve anything on the list as part of that process; it would be illegal for us to do so!

Does this have any side effects?
We’ve seen a small number of issues related to this implementation since we deployed them. Most of those issues, including the current problems with anonymous editing on Wikipedia, are down to the target websites seeing the customer requests as originating from our proxy servers. As we serve the ‘X-Forwarded-For’ header in the connection requests, Wikipedia were able to allow requests from these proxies for anonymous posting. In each case, we’ve worked with the websites to resolve these issues.

What about my privacy?
There have been quite a few posts on our forums and around on the web with people concerned about their internet traffic being filtered through proxy servers and the privacy concerns around this. As described above, the only time you web browsing will hit one of our IWF proxy servers is if IP address of the web address you are trying to visit matches a server on the IWF. If that IP address isn’t on the list, you won’t hit a proxy at all.

These proxy servers are Plusnet designed, bought and maintained. Access to those servers is strongly controlled via our change control process and an authorisation list to protect their contents. Accesses to the servers are notified to our Network Director daily to make sure all is is well – no third party including the IWF has any access to these servers.

Why do we do it?
We believe that preventing the access to, and prevention of the proliferation of the material on the list to be worth the side effects we’ve seen in it’s implementation. Of course, we must remain quick and responsive to problems caused by the implementation and we hope that our customers will hold us to that in our forums.

We use the IWF list rather than compiling our own because their employees are supported and trained at dealing with extremely shocking images. This means we don’t need to expose our own employees to this sort of content, and provide the extensive support network required to maintain it.

There will always be cases where the blocking of a URL debatable. The IWF have a complaints procedure which can be found on their website. If this procedure results in a removal or addition to the list, it will quickly be reflected within our system via the automated process detailed earlier.

Is the connection error right?
Our use of the TCP reset has generated some substantial debate on our community site. When we designed the system, we implemented it in a very similar way to a number of other service providers. A choice was made at the time to not specifically flag that the page had been blocked as we believed this would mean the list of sites could easily be ‘farmed’ which would undermine the confidentiality of the list. Since this debate has sprung up, we’ve reviewed the guidance from the IWF on how to handle a blocked page and have decided to change our implementation to return a 403 page, similar to the implementation by Thus/Demon and as requested by a number of customers on our forums. We expect to add detail to the error page which specifically refers to the IWF and our implementation of it. We are aiming to make that change before our Christmas code lock down next week.

We hope this blog explains our use of the IWF Child Sexual Abuse list and why we believe it is right for us to use it. If you have more questions or concerns, add them as a comment and we’ll try and address them as best we can. We’ll update this blog with anything raised that should be in here.

We have it on good authority from Santa’s list of who’s been naughty and nice that there are going to be plenty of 802.11n wireless routers, dongles and shiny new MacBooks beautifully wrapped and nestling beneath Christmas trees this year. So we anticipate that we’ll be getting a few calls from stressed-out customers who’ll need a little bit of extra help (but remember if you can get online, our Support Pages offer a wealth of information!)

To ensure that we’re in tiptop shape to handle this influx, we’re going to need to work a little bit smarter, so Santa has agreed to lend us 6 of his reindeer to help drive performance. Each one will be assigned to a team in the CSC, and we’ve given this novel scheme the imaginative title of ‘Reindeer Races’, or ‘Racing Reindeer’ depending on which PowerPoint slide you’re looking at. Depending on how well we do, Santa will reward our seconded reindeer based on a range of performance metrics, including:

• top performing team per week
• ensuring all analysts hit target each day for the shift pattern
• timekeeping – ensuring less than 2% lates per week
• maintaining CAR at above 85% (this is the number of calls we handle – the Call Answer Rate)
• keeping the longest call wait below 10 mins
• retaining customers
• attaining over 110% performance for the week

To give you a bit more background on where we’re going with this, our caribou contrived catalyst is based upon the concept of ‘Reindeer Dust’ – which is something those of you who can remember the mid 1980’s Christmas caper ‘Santa Claus: The Movie’ will understand without further explanation. In fact, the less we discuss said highlight of American cinema, the better. Moving swiftly on…

So, each week Santa will distribute to the top performing substitute Saami several bags of reindeer dust based upon performance, and at the end of the races we anticipate that there’ll be one, pre-eminent bunch of support analysts who’ll be enjoying an exceptional, un-Scrooge-like festive period with their reindeer in tow.

Now, for the tricky maths part. Each performance indicator attracts a certain remuneration, ranging from a paltry 5 bags of dust for achieving the Herculean feat of keeping the CAR above 85%, to a stonking 20 bags of dust for the comparably effortless cakewalk of attaining 110% team performance across a shift pattern. The elves over at Lapland bank (it must be on the verge of collapse if it’s taking dust as deposits, however magical) will then convert 100 bags of reindeer dust into a crisp £20 for the victors to spend on a team building event ranging from the humble takeaway to more profligate pastimes such as go-karting or paintballing days out.

One final note before we start – Santa’s not releasing his First Team of Reindeer as he needs these fresh for Christmas Eve. So we’re currently sat with Reindeer Team A, B, C, Faults, Sales and Customer Service; but they’re sulking a bit and we need to cheer them with new names. If any of you creative lot have any suggestions please do let us know.

Update 28/11/2008

It’s time for a quick update on the progress of our reindeer round the Top Gear, sorry, our track. We’ve finally settled on names for each team, and here are the current scores:

• 85 bags of dust – Team C – ***POW***
• 75 bags of dust – Business Support – The Stig
• 65 bags of dust – Team B – Swiety Mikolaj
• 65 bags of dust – Team A – Laina Oj Marksman 3rd
• 55 bags of dust – Faults – Fruitcake
• 45 bags of dust – Retentions – Captain Censored
• 45 bags of dust – Customer Services – Predrito

Initially The Stig was out in front, but after a bit of recalculating for stable sickness it appears that ***POW*** pinched the Pagani Zonda Roadster F to take first place, and poor old Captain Censored and Predrito got lumbered with a slow old Bugatti Veyron.

Thanks for reading

Andy

During the signup process we’ll now provide information about the speeds they can expect on their line once broadband is activated. This information will then be made available on the member centre for later reference.

An important thing to remember is that there are many external factors to take into account when measuring speed. Once you have been provided with your estimated speed, we’ll give detailed information on why this is only an estimate and why your speeds may vary.

As well as providing an estimate of the speed you should get, the line-checker will also show up any potential problems that may occur during signup, such as there already being another broadband service active on the line. If this happens then the signup journey will request a MAC code to be able to transfer the service.

At the moment we will only be making this change for signups to our residential products. We do want to add this on to the business signup journey but that will follow at a later date.

If the line-checker isn’t available due to a problem outside of our control then it will still allow the customer to continue with the signup. But they will need to tick a box to confirm they are happy to do so without the line-checker information. If the problem has occurred within our system then the customer will be given the option to restart the line-check or call support to complete the signup.

Occasionally the line-checker may not be able to find information about certain lines, this sometimes happens with a line that has only just been installed. In this instance the line-checker will ask for a postcode and provide slightly less accurate information than it would with a phone number. The customer will also be advised that this information may not be as accurate as it would if they had provided a telephone number.

The linechecker will also be a part of the housemove and upgrade process from the 5th December.

If you want to read more on this at the Ofcom site, have a look here: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/ioi/copbb/

Chris

I’ve provided more background in the blog below but here in summary are the key points:

• Plusnet is growing as a business and we intend to continue to provide the quality of support and continued levels of customer satisfaction we are known for
• Our colleagues in South Africa have great knowledge and experience in certain areas, winning several customer service awards in the last couple of years
• It doesn’t make sense for us not to look at ways in which we can work together, to improve quality and customer satisfaction
• Any changes we will be making will be made one step at time
• We’re still hiring into the Sheffield CSC http://www.plus.net/careers/

More detail read on.  If you have any questions please check out the forum..

Last year Madasafish became part of the Plusnet family.  Since Brightview was bought by BT in early 2007 we’ve been busy moving their customers over into our Plusnet ‘Workplace’.  In all, during the last 12 months, we’ve migrated more than 70,000 Madasafish, Waitrose and Greenbee customers over from the Brightview systems and network onto ours.  As part of this we’ve gained a customer support centre in Durban, South Africa, which we have been responsible for since last September. English is of course very well spoken in Durban and they’re only an hour or two ahead of Sheffield which makes it really easy to work together.

Nick Dodds, our Operations Manager, has been keeping us all up to date with the news from Durban in his blogs (Nick’s first blog). The team in South Africa have won numerous awards for service over the years, which is why the John Lewis Partnership chose Brightview to provide Internet services for their own customers. We also talked about our new CSC in South Africa at our last Customer Open Day and highlighted there how importantly we view the quality of our customer support.

Up to now our South Africa team has worked exclusively with the Madasafish and John Lewis Partnership brands.  But we’ve been working towards the point where, instead of Plusnet’s Support Centre in Sheffield getting larger and larger, we could use the South African team to allow us to continue to grow as a business.

Since we completed the integration of Brightview, key Plusnet staff have spent a lot of time over in Durban. We’ve got a much better understanding of the Waitrose, Greenbee and Madasafish customers and we’ve built up strong relationships with our colleagues in South Africa.  In fact for the past 12 months many of the CSC staff from Sheffield have been visiting in teams, spending up to 6 weeks at a time with the employees there.  As well, as part of this, CSC management from Durban have spent time here in Sheffield. There’s been a lot of focus on training how we do things the Plusnet way; particularly in using our ‘Workplace’ systems and in how we communicate as a business. We have daily conference calls and constant instant messenger chat to build the team across our two sites.

We’re now supporting well over 300,000 customers on Plusnet, Madasafish, John Lewis Partnership and BT brands. Sheffield needs some help to get through all the work – due to the growth in customer numbers on our Plusnet brands, call and ticket volumes have increased into Sheffield.  This is affecting our call answer rate and ticket turn around.  As this growth continues we are planning to maintain the service and quality levels by utilising our colleagues’ knowledge and experience in South Africa.

The South Africa team have now got a good handle on Workplace and efficiencies are improving. We’re looking at how we can move some customer service ‘workflows’ (such as failed billing) between the teams as capacity becomes available.  We aim to handle higher volumes of tickets and calls without compromising on quality.

We’re confident that by utilising the specialist teams we have at our two locations, we can improve efficiencies whilst allowing business growth, and most importantly for us, build on our reputation for excellent customer service. We’re really excited about our new Partner Programme which we’ll be launching soon and on the back of this it’s likely that we’ll need to increase the size of the business support teams in Sheffield.

Any changes in how we work will be taken one step at a time over the next year.  We’ll make sure the right teams with the right skills in the right location deliver the right level of service. And we’ll also always keep a core team for every stream of work here in Sheffield.

One of the key reasons customers choose Plusnet is the high quality of our of customer support. And we aren’t going to break that – ever. Because if ever we do, we know we’re no longer Plusnet and we’d just become another boring telecoms provider.

Throughout all of these changes we’ll keep you updated with our regular blogs and newsletters.  We’ll continue to publish our Customer Satisfaction results, the latest of which is due in the next couple of days.

Carol Axe

Customer Services Director

This month we sent out 4679 surveys and received nearly 10% of those back completed. This means that 0.8% of all customers that contacted the CSC during August gave us feedback on the support levels.

It’s important for us to highlight these figures to allow the results shown to be taken in context.

Right, on we go with the graphs.

Nature of Call

First up this month is the Nature of Call graph, this simply shows the types of calls we are receiving into the CSC over the course of a month. The graph shows an increase in technical calls and sales calls but a reduction in faults and billing questions.

Call Wait Time

It doesn’t matter what you are calling about, you want the phone answered quickly all the time. The Call Wait Time graph shows that the more of you are having to wait 5 minutes or more compared to previous months. This has increased for a couple of months now and we are working hard to stop this and cut the answer time back down.

Agent Greeting

If you’ve been waiting 5 seconds or 5 minutes the first thing you hear when we answer the phone is the greeting from the CSC agent, often this can set the tone for the whole call. A very high number of you are satisfied or higher with the greeting you receive when you call us, with the positives outweighing the negatives by a large amount once again.

DPA Check

Are you who you say you are? Well that’s our job to find out at the start of the call. This graph is showing continued improvement month to month on this, with less than 1.4% stating that they didn’t have a DPA (data protection) check.

Agent Approach

When you call up you want to speak to someone that understands your level of technical ability and adapts their approach to match. Over 91% of you were happy that the agent dealing with your call adapted their approach to your level of ability.

Agent Confidence

If we are confident in the answers we are giving you, then you’ll be more confident that we are giving you the correct information. The figures for this have been consistently high and we’ll be making sure they stay there.

Overall Service

So how did we perform? On the whole you can see the results are in the positive, however this doesn’t mean that we are sitting back and resting. A number of areas of improvement have been identified and will be pushed. Hopefully we’ll be reporting even better results next month.

Overall Service Trend

Following the trend graph from previous months, here is the updated version showing the customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction figures for the month.

As always, thanks for reading and I’ll be back soon with more results.

Chris.