A few weeks ago Ashley Highfield, former Director of Future Media & Technology at the BBC, posted an article called the “Hidden Costs” of Watching TV Online. It makes for an interesting read and is a good starting point for having a debate on this topic. Ashley raised 19 potential ‘actions’ although stressed that these weren’t necessarily his opinion. More…
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….
It’s been a while since we last provided an update about our anti-spam platform back at the beginning of February. Since then you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s all been a bit quiet on spam front, but rest assured we’ve definitely not been been resting on our laurels. Over the last two months our developers and network engineers have been busy beavering away at the configuration, code and script changes that will allow us to introduce the functionality promised when we last blogged about the subject.
As some people will realise (and others may not) - the Community Site is built using a collection of Open Source Software - specifically WordPress for the blogging aspect and SimpleMachines Forum for the forum aspect. There’s also a collection of Backend Plugins which we make use of which are Open Source, and some which aren’t - although these are the few as it’s mainly ones we’ve written which won’t be of any use to other people.
In this blog post I am going to be taking a look at some of the ways in which the two pieces of software we use to power the site differ and some of the challenges this has caused us.
Be warned: some bits of this post may be ‘geeky’ and technical and include code examples. Sorry!
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*.
Back in November I published an article about a new and improved VoIP service PlusNet were offering in conjunction with the well respected Internet solution provider Gradwell.
Since then, take up has been healthy and we now have almost 600 customers on the new beta platform. Over recent months we’ve been working to enhance the functionality we’re able to provide to our trialists and the first of these enhancements comes in the flavour of fring™
More…
Browsing ThinkBroadband the other day we noticed this particular article about business broadband, which highlights the reliance on broadband for businesses and the potential pitfalls of choosing a provider because it’s cheap. Picking a cheap business broadband provider often means you forfeit something, whether that’s the product itself or the support offered when things go wrong.
Of course, if price is not important many businesses will go for a leased line (with a guaranteed uptime) and numerous back up solutions. However for most businesses this is way above the price threshold, and should not be required for most with a little preparation and a good business broadband solution.
Here at PlusNet we have been working on our business broadband products for a while now, to make sure we offer the best value for all our business customers. We’re not the cheapest business broadband provider, but we feel we offer an excellent all round product at a reasonable price.
We have a dedicated Business Support Team setup to deal with all queries from business customers, including faults and account management as well as technical support. Calls are typically answered within 30 seconds, and tickets are prioritised across departments to ensure that any issues affecting business customers are resolved as soon as possible.
A major concern for many customers is faults, and this is one area in which we aim to out-perform other providers. We perform rigorous diagnostic checks when customers raise faults, often reducing the time taken to resolve as we can often diagnose issues which would have been raised to BT Wholesale otherwise. In addition all our customers get free dial up access whenever a fault is raised, which whilst not being as fast as broadband at least means imperative online tasks can be dealt with.
We are looking to offer enhanced care to business customers within the next few weeks, which will halve the BT Wholesale response times for customers who choose this option.
There are other things planned to further improve service for business customers over the coming months including centralised billing (through our Partner programme), a business product refresh, further faults enhancements, and business Phone services.
Keep visiting the Community site, or our Business User forums for more information on upcoming improvements.
Regards,
Mand
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.
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