PlusNet Community Website

I’m delighted to announce that following our first foray into the LAN party world last year we’ve decided to sponsor the SYchosis LAN party event in July this year.

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So, it’s s been a busy couple of weeks in the tech. world with most of the big guns making the headlines, but what’s actually happened? I’ll give you a quick round-up of the stories that caught my eye over the last fortnight. More…

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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.

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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.

1. Sales
2. Order Updates
3. Faults
4. Technical Help
5. Customer Service Billing
6. Service Status Updates

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 2^nd 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 10^th 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.

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At PlusNet we’ve made a bunch of long videos (around 20mins each!) and it would really help to be able to place bookmarks within those videos so people can quickly jump to sections that interest them.

I’ve just had a brief look at the common video sharing websites (Vimeo, YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video and Flickr’s new offering, but haven’t found any that support it.

This would be really useful!

Any one know any that support it?

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We’ve teamed up with Imagine publishing to offer you the chance to win one of 5 subscriptions to Total PC Gaming magazine, worth over £40. More…

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If you’re anything like me, you’ll use your browser’s built-in Google search more than the address bar itself to find websites. The search engine is so pervasive (it’s in my desktop browser, Nintendo Wii Internet channel and the iPhone I’d love to own) that ‘googling’ is often the easiest way.

That’s why this week’s changes to Google’s trademark rules are quite significant. Until 5th May, companies were not permitted to bid against trademarked terms. I commented on this story in the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago (requires free registration), and it’s also been covered in The Times Business Section this weekend.

Google’s trademark rule changes effectively force every company to pay for advertisements as well being listed in natural search, or face losing clicks to competitors.

Here’s how it works: If you enter ‘PlusNet’ into Google, it made sense that you should be shown results that are relevant to your search. This is very different from searching for ‘UK broadband’ for example. New rules have changed all this, and it’s all going to drive extra cash towards Google. Already other companies are starting to bid against PlusNet’s terms. It’s natural that we would want to be the top result - after all, you’re searching for PlusNet, right?

At PlusNet we chose to bid against our own name, but we weren’t obliged to. Since May 5th, to flourish in a competitive market, we’re going to have to start paying more to Google or risk being drowned-out by competitors with bigger budgets. Of course, we’re able to bid against other trademark terms, but our competitors have much deeper pockets and currently pay up to £12 per click to Google for every click on the word ‘broadband’.

How else could this affect you? If you run a small business and use search engine marketing to promote your products then you face the same challenge. The risk grows the more successful you are, because your company name will become more of a target if it generates a high volume of searches. For example, if you run a small business of 3 flower shops across your region and generate lots of leads online, you could find that big national players are able to bid against your company name when previously they may not have been able to. If you generate a significant number of searches, it’s a realistic scenario as there are lots of software tools that let search companies target the ‘long tail’ of related terms. It’s like a competitor sticking a big billboard on the side of your corner store.

What do you think?

• Are you glad that there’s now more opportunity for advertisers to target your search?
• Or would you prefer to have search limited just to the subjects / companies you asked for?

I’d love to hear your opinions.

Phil Sheard, Emarketing manager @ PlusNet
Twitter me: philsheard

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I’m guessing that most people in the tech industry must have been watching the snooker considering there seems to be more green baize related headlines (two 147s in a week) than tech industry news. However, there have been a few interesting things that are noteworthy, so I’ll cue them up now. More…

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You probably already run Anti-Virus and other security tools which prevent threats to your PCs. Kept up-to-date and with regular scanning, these tools provide good protection against most on-line security threats.

However, whether it’s because of cost, apathy, lack of knowledge or all of the above many thousands of our customers don’t have adequate security protection for their PCs and home networks. The consequences of these oversights can range from mildly annoying through to expensive and disastrous. We’re now asking our customers to help us trial one possible solution. More…

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The last few days I’ve been playing around with a service that I discovered some months back, but it only really became a viable option due to a new cellphone plan that I have recently moved to. The name of the service is Qik and the reason why it has become viable is that I no longer have to pay for mobile data, wherever I am in the world (this is a big deal for me, for other reasons - see other blogs of mine).

So, what’s this Qik service all about and how is it going to change the world? Well, Qik is a small application that you can install on your mobile phone (only Nokia S60 Operating systems so far). It then allows you to stream live video direct from your phone and onto a web page. The quality is excellent and the delay is only around 3 seconds.

So, what’s the big deal then? Well, there is a growing Qik community forming already and due to the bottomless-pit of creativity from the users out there we’ve already seen live coverage from all manner of events; a guy running the Boston Marathon strapped his phone to his chest and broadcast his entire run live; we had the aftermath of a shooting at an American school last week streamed live from the campus, we’ve had live feeds of flash-mobs, Olympic torch protests, you name it, it’s been Qik’ed.

What we have here is a new level of immediacy with news reporting. With the likes of Flickr, YouTube, Picassa et al we have documents of history (albeit recent) that are subject to censorship, but Qik allows the user to broadcast live video and audio feeds from wherever they all in the world, cutting out the media corporation middleman. Certainly, with a laptop and webcam and the various “live-cam” services available you can do similar, but ultimately you’re somewhat tethered by the technology; running it off a mobile phone changes the playing field altogether.

Qik is also trying to maximize distribution possibilities for live and on-demand video watchers by building widgets for blogs and Facebook, enabling alert systems on Twitter and Pownce, as well as tying into other video services like YouTube, Mogulus, Seesmic and Justin.tv.

Qik recently received $3m series B funding in order to invest into their software platform, so it will be interesting to see the developments, to both the company and those that use it..

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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