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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…

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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….

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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.

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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.

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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…

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Good news today came in the form of a BBC news article covering the results from the recent customer satisfaction survey carried out by consumer comparison site Broadband Choices.

The survey of 4,000 broadband households, conducted by independent research and consulting agency YouGov, asked consumers to rate their ISP against various criteria including quality and reliability, download time, clarity of billing and pricing, after sales support, value for money and speed of service activation.

PlusNet topped the table with a massive *79%* of PlusNet customers that were surveyed saying they were satisfied with their broadband service across *all six categories*.

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The purpose of this blog is to help you diagnose your broadband fault. There is a fault diagnosis flowchart to accompany this, if you wish.

I’m quite sure nearly everyone reading that will be familiar with the above phrase, most of you because it’s happened to you on occasion and you’ve needed to call your ISP’s helpdesk to find out what’s going on, and many of you because you’ve had someone on the phone to you uttering those words. Either way, our sympathies are with you.

Before we go on to do any diagnosis I should explain why home diagnostics are necessary and why we can’t just ‘push our magic button’ and make the service work again.
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Crikey the CSC isn’t the best at getting these blogs done so I’m delighted to have been the first to post other than Chris’ revealing customer satisfaction posts for the past few months, but that’s because we are all working so hard to provide you the very best in service as you would expect.

I normally work within the business team having worked at PlusNet for over 2 years now but over the past month I have been on a secondment as a TSM (Technical Shift Manager) and currently I’m the Floor Manager within the CSC assisting the TSMs on getting all of your contacts to us either by phone, support ticket, or letter handled as efficiently as possible and retaining that award winning quality.

Having never focused on team performances so much this has presented various challenges for me over the past few weeks, but in each one its been extremely rewarding to have that challenge given to me. We have also had several other experienced agents stepping up to cover managers in recent weeks, so whilst the managerial side of things may have been lower in experience than normal the enthusiasm and new ideas along with PlusNet experience should have covered this in most circumstances so as not to impact on our customer experience for you contacting us or vice versa.

As you may be aware within the CSC we have 3 teams that rotate covering technical calls in addition to customer service and sales calls. These teams also have agents trained to work on ADSL faults either via the initial contact to us or having tested it to handle it once raised to BT. The teams operate on a 4 day working cycle working from 7am to 4pm for the first two days and then from 2pm to 11pm, followed by two days off. So if Team A are in at 7am they are joined by Team B at 2pm so the whole of the main working day and hours are covered, not forgetting an analyst from each team who will also be on nights when they work from 10.45pm until 7.15am.

In addition to this we have a Cancellations team, dedicated sales and customer service teams, a provisioning team that handles all activations of various type such as house moves and new sign ups which is called BOT (Broadband Operations Team) and my normal home of Business Support offering support solely for our business customers on our business products. These teams have there own working hours due to business needs such as BOT have to be available when BT are so work 9am until 6pm, the Business team are available from 8am until 8pm.

So in handling one of the technical shifts, or as floor manager, what type of things would I have to get involved in? Well it can be quite literally anything. It could be making sure agents are getting their holiday requests sanctioned to taking an escalated customer call. It could be doing QOS where we mark the agent’s performance on randomly selected calls or tickets, it could be being in a performance meeting with the other managers looking at what went right or wrong and what could be done to improve on that. Quite simply we could be asked to do anything and although it may sound clichéd no two days are ever the same.

The first thing a manager would do on arriving for their shift would be to make sure we have no staff who have rang in ill. Having done this we can then look at the resource we have available and assign roles for the day so the agents get tasked with their primary role such as call handling and then they know what target levels they should be aiming to perform too. We then need to make sure that our portal statistics have been updated to advise customers of the average ticket and fault handling times. We always try to arrange for scheduled account changes to be done in the morning too if the night shift have been unable to action them so that has to be assigned as customers are expecting to be moved to their new product. We would also need to know what, if any, issues have arisen at work over the previous few hours or so since we were last in that could be impacting for the team upon our arrival. So if any scheduled maintenance has been done has it completed? Has it caused any problems that are then being investigated further to the maintenance? By the time you have done all of this 9am is quickly upon you and the other teams such as BOT start arriving so you then may need to juggle your resource again depending on their work flows and staffing levels. All the team managers will meet around 9am to discuss various resource affecting issues to make sure the whole department is staffed as well as possible. From 9am onwards you start to notice that the call volumes start to rise so hopefully all the hard work we have then put into resource will start to be reflected in answering your queries as quickly as possible.

The team manager on shift then has various reports to produce and write up and get these posted to senior management so they can review the performance and we provide them a plan on what will need looking at through the day as main areas of concentration. It could be that due to a higher then average number of sign ups that the BOT team are looking at why some of the orders have failed automatically, it could be a simple reason such as the customer already has ADSL and hasn’t provided a MAC but it has to be addressed and we have to show to our senior management that the issues have been seen and more importantly are being addressed.

All of a sudden lunchtime is with us and we have to make sure that our staff can go up get their lunch whilst still making sure the calls are being answered promptly. This is an area I have been looking at to try and improve things even more for both staff and our customer experience. As its lunchtime we may well get additional calls from customers who want to ring us on their break but we cant just say to our teams they cant not eat as they have to have fuel in them to get them through the day. As with many things within life its a fine balancing act and I’m in the process of trying various different ways of handling this, some may work well others may not but its a vitally important area we must continue working hard to get even better for you.

At 2pm the late shift start so once more resource can be looked at as we have a whole extra team to use for 2hrs until the morning shift leave. It may mean even more call takers for that period, it may mean helping one of the specialist teams such as BOT out with any work flows they have. It could mean that we can then take one of the teams for a team meeting or training which is not possible to do at any other time, but normally Call Answer Rate (CAR) rises dramatically at this time due to being the part of the day when maximum number of staff for the day is in. As a manager you may take this time to use the extra resource to handle 1-2-1’s with your team to appraise their monthly performance and to look towards the following month as well as the remaining part of the quarter.

Many times during the day you will get asked varied questions from your teams which could either be a quick 30seconds clarifying something and advising them, or it could escalate to an issue that you become part of and may require additional support elements to be involved and could become an issue that could then take a lot more of your time as part of the investigation.

We also do constant QOS (Quality of Service) checks on our analysts. This will involve monitoring them via their calls and tickets to help maintain a high standard along with highlighting any development needs for the analysts so those can be addressed as quickly as possible. All the QOS is fedback to the analysts so anything that is positive or negative can be seen and explained as that is the best way for them to develop. We can then assist in team training, and side-by-side coaching. To assist with this we are getting an analyst who will be stepping up as dedicated QOS analyst and they will develop further training plans based on the information they get from results of their work. So as you can see we take this very seriously to make sure that your getting the very best response as you deserve and put a lot of time into getting this as high as possible for you. Hopefully with some of the recent awards we have started to collect this commitment is starting to bear fruit. One of our TSMs Simon posted more on this earlier in the year. To read about it check click http://community.plus.net/csc/2007/07/01/quality-of-customer-support-followup/

Did I also mention the meetings we have to attend throughout the company to see what new things are being done could impact on the CSC, the return to work meetings after staff sickness, making sure our EODs are done from our teams, authorising holiday requests, developing action plans for any agents who have had extended sickness periods or have been missing targets, writing blogs , covering for other TSMs if away, recruitment telescreening and assessment day planning, escalated calls and tickets

Well as you can see this overview of what a TSM has to do is pretty much an endless job and certainly makes our days fly by as we just don’t get time to stop, its a good thing I don’t smoke otherwise I would get serious withdrawal symptoms whilst at work.

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People values are one of the cores of the PlusNet Cornerstones, and are listed as follows.

Be open, honest and respectful

Demonstrate drive, commitment and passion

Be accountable and participative by taking ownership and responsibility

Be creative, innovative and improvement focused

Support, educate and trust others

I don’t know about you, but when I first read these I did have some concerns. I’ve read Dilbert, and I’ve also worked in the public sector and as a result I have experienced a number of half (and even full) day workshops on objectives, mission statements and any number of other expense-justifying corporate-isms.

The thing that surprised me about these people values is, they really work - mostly because they aren’t deliberately mentioned at any opportunity, or shoved in your face whenever possible. I’ll attempt to explain why.

Well being open, honest and respectful is easy to see (not necessarily easy to do though). It helps that everyone tries, when someone shows you respect it’s a lot easier to respect them back, likewise with openness and honesty. As a CSC agent on the phone you can actually open your mouth and say that you don’t agree with something that a Director has just said and granted you won’t often get a complete turnaround (though this has been known to happen!) but you will at least get an explanation of why things are like they are.

It is therefore the case that anyone at PlusNet can talk to anyone else, regardless of station, and know that their views will be taken in to account. Which is nice.

Demonstrating drive, commitment and passion. Now. This sounds to my cynical mind exactly like anything any business would workshop at new employees for hours. Hasn’t happened here. Sure, it’s been mentioned. But the reason I know it works? Monthly awards, rallies, and (almost daily, it seems) forum posts lauding the exploits of Mr X from development or Miss Y from the products team because Project Z has been launched and is a success. Or there’s been a new tool implemented in Workplace (the platform that we work on) that has saved our CSC agents hours of work per week. It doesn’t have to take you hours, you don’t have to work day and night for two weeks. If it makes a difference, and you played a part, everyone loves you. It’s a good feeling.

Back to the managementspeak - Be accountable and participative by taking ownership and responsibility. As I said above, people do volunteer – partly I’m sure for the recognition, but for me it’s honestly because what I have volunteered to do (for example, this blog post) will actually make a difference to some people. Whether that’s who I work with, who I work for, or someone else entirely - it’s good to know. In addition it’s refreshing not to have to play the blame game at work. There’s no blame culture, simply because people know who’s working on what and will hold their hands up if the ball has been dropped. Once that is the case everyone can get on with working to sort out the issue rather than trying to shunt the blame about – and no, there’s no punishment and re-education doesn’t mean a 1984 style brainwashing. Provided you know what you did wrong everything is good and everyone can get on with more important things.

Being creative, innovative and improvement focused. Again, with all of the above in effect it appears that the working culture is such that if you can see where something would make a difference it’s a simple matter of posting the idea in a forum. This will then be discussed, you can persuade your colleagues to post supporting the idea – basically it’s as easy to make it known as it is to think ‘oh, it’s not worth it’ (and of course there’s the added incentive of being recognised) – and that’s it. When it’s that easy to make a difference, people put the effort (such as it is) in.

And finally, support, educate and trust others.

I think this is what has made the difference for me in being happy here, as clichéd as that sounds. Someone will give you a job to do, and then leave you to do it. Doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s – as above – actually something that makes a difference and you’re trusted to do that it’s quite a liberating feeling. You are trusted to do your work, and in turn you can trust that others will do theirs.

This also is good in that you know that your colleagues have your back should you need a hand. There’s always someone either nearby or on the end of a phone or jabber message that can help you do what you need to.

That’s the great thing about these people values. They aren’t just a set of rules to be applied, or a set of mission statements/company objectives/corporate guidelines. They are actually a constant across the business and in use all the time, without – and this is the really great part - anyone actually needing to think about it.

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