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.
One of the challenges of writing articles for a company blog is to write about the right stuff. It’s easy to write about stuff which really isn’t relevant to our customers. No-one really wants to hear what I think of Batman – The Dark Knight, or what our CEO has for breakfast. But every now and then something interesting comes up in the blogosphere, which we just have to give our opinion on. Rohit Bhargava is a pretty well known marketing blogger and he’s reported on a disagreement of what makes good customer service.
We’ve been able to send you updates to your written ticket enquiries by text message for a while now but we’ve improved things even more recently. Did you know you can now reply to your ticket via text? More…
Howsit! Over a month has gone since I made Durban my home, so this feels like a good time to give you an update on progress with the support teams for our sister brands, here in South Africa.
Here’s a question for you: what’s the difference between Technical Support and Customer Service? The answer here in Durban at the moment is, a lot! More…
During each month we randomly a sample of customers who have called in to complete a survey on the quality of the support they have received. The feedback and results received help us to identify areas for improvement and training within the Customer Support Centre (CSC).
More…
So the winter months have passed us by and we’re now (potentially) nearing the summer time. I often have to wonder if spring even exists in the UK anymore! Anyway I digress, so onto the purpose of my post…
The purpose of the Customer Feedback Survey is to facilitate a better understanding of what our customers think of the service they receive from the Customer Support Centre (CSC).
Customer feedback will be utilised to identify areas for improvement within the department, it also provides a feedback mechanism on the performance of individual agents.
For those of you that are not sure what an IVR is or want to know how the PlusNet phone system works when you call our support lines here is my blog in an attempt to explain this.
What is an IVR and what does it stand for?
IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response.
It is a term for any telephone-based application that prompts the inbound caller for information using a recorded or synthesized human voice. Most IVR systems do not allow the caller to respond by voice and require the user to respond through a touch-tone keypad. From a business perspective, the IVR is used to route calls to agents with the correct skill set and is known as skills based routing.
Interestingly the IVR makes up 17% of the feedback we got from recent surveys. You can read more around this here http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/04/18/customer-satisfaction/
So What Happens When You Call?
Our IVR is relatively simple and our aim to ensure that customers are not left with choice after choice and a whole host of recorded messages when trying to speak to a human being on the other end of the phone. Most options will route your call to an Agent after one choice. We believe this is sufficient for us to route the call and ensure we offer the best customer experience we can. We cannot remove the IVR as we would be unable to route the calls effectively without having a different number for each type of call, which is confusing for the customer.
When you call, you hit the IVR almost straight away. You will be presented with the following options.
By choosing one of these IVR options your call will be diverted to the relevant team.
After you have made your choice you will be placed in a queue. If there is a wait time in excess of 10 minutes, soon to be 5 minutes, then a recorded message will be presented to you while you wait explaining how long you are expected to wait. You will then be connected to the correct member of our support team who is a subject matter expert in the field of your enquiry. This is why it is important that you choose the correct option, for example, Sales Agents are not trained to deal with technical queries, therefore choosing this option means we will need to transfer you; and your wait time will be extended by the time you spend speaking to the Sales Agent.
Hopefully you won’t be kept for long and reducing the wait time is one of our main focus points within the contact centre, our average wait time is around 1 min 30 however there are times when we do get busy. Just have a think of what time of the day you call contact centres. Well you can pretty much guarantee that everyone else is probably calling at the same time. Early in the week and early evening is when we see our highest demand.
We do have specialist teams to deal with your enquiry. Our technical team is trained to deal with any issue from sales to faults and cover is provided 24 hours a day so no matter when you call you can speak to UK based member of Staff. We also have a dedicated customer services team and a specialist business support team.
Previous feedback received from customers
From recent customer satisfaction surveys we have had one or two customers requesting we put what number they are in the queue before they get through to a member of our support staff you can see the results of those surveys here http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/04/21/customer-satisfaction-results-from-march-2008/. This has been given great consideration however after much deliberating we decided this was not a practical option and opted for current wait time instead, when this is in excess of 5 mins. The reasoning behind this decision was that the position in the queue doesn’t represent how long you are waiting. Yes if there are 15 in front of you could expect to be waiting a while however there could be 2 or 3 customers waiting and all our agents are tied up on calls where the customer needs that extra bit of help with a difficult issue they might have. You might be sat there thinking that every agent can’t be tied up on such a call at the same time but it does happen believe me. In instances such as this, you could be 2nd in the queue but could wait in excess of 5 mins. It also depends how many Agents we have logged in at the time concerned, for example, if we have 2 in the queue and only 2 Agents working, this occurs during the nightshift, then again this does not provide realistic expectations of how long you may have to wait.
Also saying you are 10th in the queue may make you abandon the call, however if we have 35 Agents on calls then you should be answered within a few minutes.
When I call a contact center I would much rather know how long I’m expected to wait rather than what position I’m in the queue not knowing if my call is going to be answered in 2 or 10 minutes and I think that most people agree. But again this can be problematic. The estimate is based on the calls presented that day so far and is a best guess, I always find that when the estimated time is up, I then begin to become frustrated when I have not been answered.
For all options there are pros and cons, however we are trialling giving the longest wait time information when this exceeds 5 mins. If this does not appear to be working then we will revisit this sometime in the near future.
Always remember that you can look at todays call history on our website before you call at http://portal.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=212 You can also see the number of calls we have waiting from this page. As well as this we have extensive support pages to help you with your issue and most housekeeping transactions can be completed online by you, by logging into the members centre on our website http://www.plus.net/support/?helpheader=support . In most cases there is no need to call if you have time to look for the answers yourself. This is also available from any location, so if you are unable to connect at home, you can do some diagnostics and gains support without calling, via a friend or your work PC, if you are allowed to use the internet, 
, of course!
Well that’s it I hope that clears a few things up and you can sleep at night now and I hope you enjoyed reading.
The purpose of the Customer Feedback Survey is to facilitate a better understanding of what our customers think of the service they receive from the Customer Support Centre (CSC).
Customer feedback will be utilised to identify areas for improvement within the department, it also provides a feedback mechanism on the performance of individual agents. More…
Hi, I’m Luke and I’m one of the Operation Managers in the Customer Support Centre (CSC). My role is to help run the Support Centre for PlusNet. There are two Ops Managers here and we look after a team of 8 Managers who own specific areas, such as Faults, Customer Service, Provisioning, Technical Support etc….
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.
© Plusnet plc All Rights Reserved. E&OE
Community Site News is powered by WordPress
