Hello to all CSC Blog readers, may I take this opportunity to introduce myself to you all, for those of you who don’t already know me I am currently Head of the CSC here at PlusNet and have been for the last 4 years. Quality of support is key to what we do, for me speed of answer and response is important but offering good support when customers do contact us is equally if not more important, so I wanted to give you an insight into the results we are currently seeing and some of the things we are doing. We currently measure the quality of support in various different ways.

TSM (Technical Shift Manager) remote monitoring

TSMs are tasked with completing a number of quality assessments on individuals within their team, at least 4 on a daily basis. It is their responsibility to ensure that there is a 50/50 split between tickets and calls. We use slightly different criteria for each work stream, however the required levels on each is 85%. You may ask why this isn’t 100% and this is due to the fact that the final 15% is an over and above score, covering things such as excellent empathy, understanding etc. The process is for the TSM to complete the assessment and then feedback the results to the individual. This includes both areas in which the individual achieved or over achieved and areas in which they need to focus and the support they will be given to improve. This then forms the basis for objectives for the next month. TSMs complete over 200 of these types of measures on a monthly basis and this forms part of their objectives.

TSM (Technical Shift Manager) Side By Side coaching

On a weekly basis TSMs are tasked with spending 4 hours per week on this activity, if their team members are fairly new then they will concentrate on these individuals and they will do more than the required amount. This activity involves the TSM sitting with the individual analyst, listening to calls and observing tickets and then providing immediate feedback and support on both technical areas for improvement and soft skills. In this instance the results are not necessarily documented unless there is a need for future actions and activities to be captured and followed up on.

I am conscious that these are all internally generated results and feel it is important to ensure we have a balanced overview and perspective of the support we offer. Therefore we also collate and review customer feedback on tickets, faults and calls.

Customer feedback on calls

Every 3^rd call where the phone system can match the CLI (phone number) of the caller with an account in our database, we send out a link, via email to a survey to assess the quality of the support. This is collated on a monthly basis by the Comms team; previously this was collated by the TSMs. The results are published to the business with a list of issues and actions based upon the results. This then forms part of the operational plan for the coming month/s. I have attached below the overall results of the survey for those of you that are interested in looking at this and showing the progressive improvements we have made over the last few months, you need to bear in mind, that last month we changed the measures from 4 options to 8, this is why the graph may seem confusing at first glance. Our target is to ensure that over 50% of all rating are in the top 2 categories, very satisfied and extremely satisfied.

Customer feedback on tickets

Every time a customer closes a ticket we ask them to rate the level of the support they have received, this is currently rated with 3 faces, smiley, neutral and sad. This is reviewed daily by the late TSM, who reviews all “sad” ratings, gives feedback and support to the analyst where this is required and if it is necessary contacting the customer to take ownership of the issue. Again you can find graph below detailing the responses we have had. It is interesting to note that some “sad” face ratings are due to the customer not liking our answers, in these circumstances the answer is correct and there is nothing else we could have done, i.e. wording this differently etc. As you can see this again shows very positive results

Customer feedback on Faults

We recently launched beta phase of feedback when customer faults are closed. This will be used to measure our performance in this area. We are currently in the process of collating this. Once this has been collated we will be using this to review and amend the processes and procedures and work to improve the customer experience on faults in general.

Future developments

We are currently working on a “Mystery shopper” assessment, which we will use for key processes and procedures and will again help us to audit and improve processes and procedures and measure the quality of the support in these areas. Simon, who is a TSM within the dept has this has one of his objectives, so watch this space for further updates. We have in the past and will continue to maintain the focus we have on the quality of support in all workflows, there will be times when we drop the ball and where new starters who are in “learn” mode will make mistakes, however I hope you can see that we are working to minimize this, we still have areas for improvement and we will be driving this onwards and upwards throughout the Year.

2 Comments »

House Moves: Processes, Payments and Problems

Moving house is something that everyone is likely to do at some stage in their lifetime.  Moving broadband from your old house to your new one is something a number of customers ask us to do. I’d like to outline the processes that we at PlusNet perform to move your broadband from one address to another, costs incurred and some problems which we may experience along the way.

Processes and charging

In order to allow our customers to request such a house move, there is a page on our website that allows you to make this request and asks you for all of the relevant information.  This page can be found here:

http://www.plus.net/my.html?s=0&action=adsl_reprovision

This page will ask you when you want your house move to occur, as well as asking you for the new telephone number and the address at which you want us to move your broadband service to. It also asks you when you want your existing service at your current address to be removed.

Because we have to pay BT Wholesale £40 to activate a telephone line with a broadband service, we give you the option to either pay this upfront, or to defer the charge.  What this means is that if you choose to defer the charge, we will pay the £40 charge to BT on your behalf and if you stay with us for over 12 months, we will write off the charge.

Unfortunately, when we place our orders with BT Wholesale, there are associated timescales with cancelling and ordering a new service.  Currently, a cease order takes 5 working days (although there is work ongoing within BT Wholesale to reduce this to 1 working day) and a provide order also takes 5 working days.

When you are requesting a house move and changing your telephone number, we can request a new provide as soon as your new telephone number is operational, taking 5 working days. 

However, if you are keeping the same telephone number we are, owing to a long term flaw within the BT Wholesale ordering system, unable to place a new provide order until the cease at your address is completed.  This means that the process will take approximately 12 working days (5 days for the cease, 2 days for BT’s database to update and 5 days for the provide) In real terms, this equates to about two and a half weeks.  The implementation of the one day cease will reduce this to 8 working days, which is great news for our customers that wish to keep their telephone number when moving house – something that many people (quite understandably) choose to do.

There is also an option to do something called a “simultaneous provide”.  This allows you to move both your telephone number and your broadband service on the same day.  Please bear in mind though that this requires a considerable notice period, preferably about 2 weeks. You will also need to call BT Retail (150) and ask them to move your telephone number to your new address and ask them for a simultaneous provide code at the same time.  You can then provide us with this code, which will allow us to request that BT Wholesale move your broadband on the same day.  It’s worth bearing in mind that the success rate for simultaneous orders isn’t fantastic, partly owing to the extended lead time when placing them, along with other issues such as receiving incorrect simultaneous codes from BT (these codes are also referred to as “start reference” or “fast peter” codes by BT).

Potential problems

As with anything in life, problems can arise, even with something that may sound as simple as moving a broadband service.  I’ll outline some of the potential problems that can be experienced which may cause delays in the re-provision of the service.

DACS

A DACS is a Digital Access Carrier System.  Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Access_Carrier_System

I would generally refer to DACS as simply just a line sharing device that does not support a broadband service (it also reduces the potential speed of a regular dial up service).  There are two different types of DACS.  An internal one, which would require a BT Engineer visit to remove it, which we would need to book with BT Wholesale on your behalf with your prior consent.

Unsurprisingly, the other type of DACS is one external to your premises.  This can vary from something on the outside of your house, to something on your street, to in extreme cases, something buried under a road which then requires BT to gain planning permission from your local council to remove.

We can experience delays in internal DACS removal as we need to contact you first to find out any suitable times for BT to visit and BT generally insist on 5 working days notice in order to do this.  With external DACS work, this has to go through BT Wholesale’s Planning Department to determine potential costs of performing the work. This add to the potential delays.  BT also have a budget of £1,000 for DACS removal.  If the work that is required exceeds this amount, they will not perform the work which unfortunately means that our ability to provide an ADSL service is impossible.

Exchange Capacity

Every exchange has a finite amount of capacity.  This means that they can only support a certain number of broadband services at any one time.  In busy exchanges this can result in what is essentially a queue for service. When the exchange becomes “full” we have to wait for other broadband services to be removed before new orders will be accepted.  This again, causes delays in the order becoming completed.  We will contact BT on a regular basis to try and gain a timescale for when the orders is likely to occur, but often this is difficult owing to the length of the “queue” being unknown. 

Tags-on-the-line

Tags-on-the-line are essentially “markers” left on the line by a previous service.  Imagine you have just moved house and asked PlusNet to move your service to your new house.  However, the previous owner of the house also had a broadband service with a different ISP.  The previous tenant then did not ask his ISP to cancel the service or the ISP failed to remove the service from the line correct.  This then results in a “Tag” being left on the line preventing us from placing an order. 

We then have to contact BT Wholesale’s Tags Team on 0800-1690934, which is a service open for both ISPs and customers to call to determine what kind of Tag is present on the telephone line.  They will then be able to remove any service on the line, although this currently takes 5 working days for the cease to complete (remember I spoke about one day cease earlier).

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consumeradvice/internet/customer_service/tagonline/ 

Again, this adds to any potential delays, but we will always call BT Wholesale on your behalf to get as much information about the delays being experienced before letting you know why we are experiencing problems in completing your order.

Incompatible Products 

Incompatible Products are services on telephone lines that prevent the ability to have a broadband order placed.  I spoke about DACS earlier, but there are a few other instances which prevent broadband compatibility.  These include alarm systems, PBX’s, ISDN amongst others.  If we are unable to gain this information from BT Wholesale, we may need to ask you to speak to BT Retail, as often we are unable to ascertain the type of incompatibility and BT Retail will not pass this information on to us as we are not their customer – we deal exclusively with BT Wholesale. 

That’s pretty much all I can think of at this moment in time! As you can see, it’s not quite that simple process that many people may believe and I hope I’ve been able to provide an insight into why delays may occur.

2 Comments »

Following customer feedback at our open day and discussion with the PlusNet Usergroup, we are pleased to announce that from yesterday we have introduced geographical contact numbers to contact our support centre. We feel that this will offer additional benefits to our customers who can take advantage of free minutes included in their phone packages, including our own Home Phone service.

The 0845 contact numbers will continue to run alongside the new numbers and we hope that this will ensure that it is even easier to contact our support team by phone, should you need to. Our websites have already been updated with these new numbers.

For your reference, the new support numbers are as follows :-

Plusnet Support 0114 2965198
PlusNet Business 0114 2965182
PlusNet Faults 0114 2965188

F9 Support 0114 2965197
F9 Business 0114 2965180
F9 Faults 0114 2965186

Free-Online Support 0114 2965199
Free-Online Business 0114 2965179
Free-Online Faults 0114 2965183

As always, we value your feedback and comments and hope that you find the new contact numbers a helpful addition should you ever need to contact us.

2 Comments »

ADSL Provisioning is probably one of the two most impactly customer facing aspects of the ADSL service provided by various suppliers, with the other being the faults troubleshooting and resolution process. We’ve all heard reports of TalkTalk taking months and months to deliver service on the their LLU platform with their extremely large backlogs, but other ISPs often experience delays too.

Since taking over the Provisioning Team at PlusNet, ensuring that these delays are to a minimum are now my responsibility. There are various aspects where delays can occur, namely DACS (line sharing devices non compatible with ADSL), lack of capacity at exchanges and ever more commonly these days, “Tags” on the line whereby the previous tenant of a location has not had their ADSL service cancelled, meaning that the new ISP is not able to place an order on the line until this has been removed. There have bbeen considerable improvements seen here over the last year with BT implementing their “Tags on the Line” team for both customers and ISPs.

Possibly the hardest part in the ADSL Provisioning aspect of the service is the house moving process. Of course, you can request a simultaneous provide code from BT an they will happpily tell you that you can easily move house with any supplier. In a slightly more realistic approach, you need to give the ISP at least 7 working days to approach the request, the simultaneous provide code has to be correct, which often it isn’t and there’s generally a 50% success rate at best.

Or you can go down the old fashioned route. Cease the service at your old house and provide the service at the new house. This is generally pretty straightforward, unless of course you want to keep your phone number. Let’s face it, why wouldn’t you want to? Save all the hassle of having to redistribute your phone number, getting various business cards reprinted, the list goes on. What the majority of our customers do not realise (and for extremely valid reasons!!) is that if you keep the same telephone number, we are unable to place the new provide order until the cease has gone through. So essentially you’re looking at roughly 3 weeks for the entire process to complete, leaving the customer without a broadband service for 1-2 weeks, assuming everything goes to plan. This is down to the cease and provide orders both takinng 5 working days to complete and relies on the BT Availability Checker updating itself, which often takes a couple of days.

Then there’s the more recent development from our friends at OpenReach and Wholesale. We’ve been seeing a number of orders (upto about 25%) being cancelled by BT, merely stating “duplicate order”. Now, we’re totally unable to see whhat the duplicate order may be, as BT are now running on two backend systems from a Provisioning perspective. That of Wholesale, with their e.Co system that we and other ISPs use for Provisioning and Fault Reporting. then there’s that of the OpenReach Portal, which we do not have access to, coupled with the fact that the two systems don”t seem to pair up too well. So this can lead to our having to place orders numerous times, despite speaking to various departments within BT and various levels. This is also affecting other ISP as a few post in the Zen forums are proving.

The Provisioning Team always does make a conscious effort to contact any of our customers that experience delays with their orders, in fact it’s our policy to always do so. I see this with the large number of outbound calls thhey are making every day. It’s also the ethos thhat we are encouraging within the CSC as awhole, to just pick up the phone and call the customer instead of just sending a ticket, especially when the customer doesn’t have access to the internet!

Hopefully this (somewhat longer that expected) posting in the types of delays that can be experienced and the processes involved in what we have to do to get the service to your home will help increase your understanding as to what we get upto in our team.

Jusqu’a le fois prochaine!

James

2 Comments »

I’m fairly sure that quite a few of you will have received a “stock response” from someone within the CSC at some stage in the time that you’ve been a customer of ours. For our forum readers, you’ll probably have seen quite a few instances of these being posted, often in regards to a fault or a provisioning issue.

Many people may ask why we do this, or why we don’t just make sure our analysts are answering every ticket with a personalised response. In a perfect world, that may well have been possible, but given the repetitive nature of the provisioning and faults roles especially, it makes perfect sense to have stock replies for various BT responses and such like.

There are occasionally instances where the stock ticket replies could be worded in a more appropriate fashion, demonstrating more empathy and providing better instructions where our customer may get a little confused. I have taken on a quarterly objective to review and rewrite where appropriate, or just to remove all of our stock responses. There’s approximately 400-500 of them! So hopefully we’ll start seeing some improvements here and I’m always grateful for any feedback, what with it being the breakfast of champions and all that!

2 Comments »

Hi, I’m Taryn, (more often just known as Taz) and I am one of the Customer Service Analysts here at Plusnet. I’ve been with Plusnet for three months full time and before that I was a temp in Plusnet. I thought that I’d post here so if you see me answer on the forum or if you ring in and get to speak to me then you’ll know a bit about me and I wont just be a name. I was born and bred in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, I moved to England in May 2005 bimbled about a bit from Maidstone to Bristol and back to Dunstable before coming to the frozen north and settling in Sheffield where I ended up working for Plusnet.

So what does a day in the life consists of for me? It starts with the 3 mile walk to work, so that I’m wide awake when I get here followed by a coffee, (large coffee:)!) Then its either on to the phones or jumping into the tickets to get the questions and queries there answered. Later in the day there tends to be meetings and presentations. I am lucky enough to be one of the people that leads the discussions on what we call Cornerstones: its how we do what we do, and why we do it. Have a look:

http://www.plus.net/careers/cornerstones/cornerstones_what.shtml

Outside work I have to confess I am a bit of a technophobe, odd when you consider where I work! Most of my evenings are spent reading. I’m currently studying for a degree in history with the Open University. Just because I want to which has to be the best reason. I also read lots of fiction, (currently I’m in the middle of the George RR Martin books)

I’m a gamer, not one that sits alone at a computer though I am a LARPer (Live Action Role Playing) Basically I get dressed up in quasimedieval gear and run around fighting people with rubber swords. Best description I’ve ever heard is Cross Country Pantomime! I am a ref for the Lorien Trust (www.lorientrust.com) one of the big companies in LARP. I also play a lot of board games, had the pleasure of attending Spiel in Essen last year, biggest games fair I’ve ever been to, that was cool.
So there you go thats a teeny bit about me, I look forward to chatting to you all either in the forums or if you ring in.

All the best

Taz

No Comments »