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Welcome to the latest edition of Plus, the Plusnet Newsletter This summer we launched our first big advertising campaign, which has been focussed on London. Regular visitors to the capital and Londoners won’t have been able to miss our ads across the Underground, and viewers of ITV London will have seen Plusnet on TV for the first time too, as we’ve been sponsoring the ITV London Weekday Weather. As part of the campaign we’re running a competition to win an iPod, so read on to find out how you could get hold of one of Apple’s latest gadgets. Just a few weeks ago we won the award for ‘Best Value Home Broadband’ at this year’s Top 10 Broadband Awards’. It’s always great to get industry recognition for our products so we’re very excited here at Plusnet Towers! PC Advisor also gave us a ‘Recommended’ accolade in their 2009 Broadband Survey, based on results from over 6,500 people who were asked to rate the reliability of their connections, their download speeds and the customer service they receive. We also have great news for our Plusnet Home Phone Talk customers – see below for more information about the changes we’re making from 22nd October which we think you’ll be really pleased with. One final thing – don’t forget that the Discussion Forums are the perfect place to get advice from fellow customers or members of the Plusnet Team. If you’ve not yet joined the Community, I’ve included a very quick guide showing how you can get involved at the end of this newsletter. Thanks for reading, Anthony Vollmer Contents
We’re pleased to announce that our Evenings & Weekends and Anytime Talk Plans will include FREE calls to 0845 and 0870 numbers from 22nd October*, and earlier this month we sent notifications about this change to our existing Home Phone customers. If you’re not already enjoying one of our great value Home Phone products you can get full details on all the other features here. 2. Recommend a friend for even cheaper broadband Back in April the folks over at uSwitch found from their Broadband Customer Satisfaction survey that 8 out of 10 of Plusnet customers would recommend us to a friend. This isn’t just a meaningless statistic though – don’t forget that you save money every month for each person you recommend to Plusnet. We give away over £45,000 per month in discounts to our customers who refer so make sure you get some of the share! Our My Referrals page has more helpful hitns and tips on how to refer. 3. London Calling – 8 out of 10 Plusnet customers would recommend us to a friend Finding out that 8 out of 10 of our customers would recommend us made us so happy that we decided to tell everyone in London about it through in our new marketing campaign which has been all over tubes, buses, the TV and the press. 4. Win an iPod As our London campaign is centred around recommendation we’ve decided to run a competition to see who can come up with the most creative list of the things that they would recommend. If you’d like the chance to win an iPod simply put together a list of 8 things you’d recommend and why, and mail your entry to 8outof10@plus.net. For some inspiration and competition rules, check out this blog about our London campaign. Entries don’t need to be just about the internet or Plusnet, and the funnier and wittier the better. The deadline for entries has been extended to 31st October. 5. It’s official – Plusnet is the best value home broadband provider In September we won another award to add to our collection – at this year’s prestigious Top 10 Broadband Awards we scooped the award for ‘Best Value Broadband Provider’. Hurrah! 6. Fibre optic broadband trial Earlier this year we announced that we’d be trialling new, superfast broadband using fibre optic cable. Our first handful of customers on the Muswell Hill and Whitchurch exchanges are now live and enjoying faster speeds. Take a look at this blog over on the Community Site to find out more about the trial. The Discussion Forums on the Community Site are the ideal place to ask for advice before contacting the support team by phone or ticket. Whatever your question you can be sure another customer has either seen it before or can point you in the right direction. If not, our staff will be there to give a helping hand. Of course, you can always just have a friendly chat with other customers If you’ve never used the Discussion Forums before, you’ll need to register a new username and password, which is really easy to do and takes just a minute or two. Follow the steps here to register. Once you’ve logged in using your normal account details, you just need to set-up a separate username and password for Community. This newsletter has been sent to you as a valued customer of Plusnet. If you would like to change your preferences for the electronic communication you receive from us, please click here. Please note that by changing your preferences, you will no longer receive other promotional communications from Plusnet, including free gifts, details of competitions and information about new products and services. *Inclusive calls to 0845 and 0870 numbers have a maximum call duration of 60 minutes. Redial to avoid charges. Calls to indirect access numbers and dial up internet access are excluded. See website for details. Email ref: E_200910News Plusnet plc |
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© PlusNet plc. All Rights Reserved. E&OE
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Hello Readers!
It’s the end of another working week here in Plusnet Towers, a little later than planned and I’m now on a double brace! I’ve been quite busy and not really had the chance to arrange anyone for today but I promise there’ll be a different editor next week!
On with the show then, it’ll be a quick one this week I think. First we have Rohan from the CSC…
What can I say, its been a great week for the Provisioning Department, and all thanks are due to Karen the Faults and Provisioning Service Delivery Manager who has done a awesome job at creating all the new processes that has made the Prov department shine in the lime light once again. Hats off to this great team that never gives up on any task assigned to them and always makes working with them a pleasure.
and finally Jen from HR, who was drafted in to do this at the last minute after a rota mix-up!
It’s quite amusing that I’m writing this as I’ve only been in today. However I believe the rest of the team have been doing an upgrade to our HR system with help from Jamie in IT.
This means that all day we’ve been getting messages along the lines of:
‘can u reset my ciphr password pls or do i need to raise a task?’
(Yes, you know who you are…)
Amongst other stuff we also had a team meeting today and I did a very interesting update on employment law (well I thought it was very interesting, anyway). We’ve also been updating our people plan, where we decide what we’re going to be working on for the next few months. Watch this space for more….
As well as this, we had new starters on Monday so they were inducted. Planning for Health and Safety week has continued – I don’t think this has escaped the notice of a single person in the building. Oh, and of course, it’s that time in the quarter when we collate everyone’s performance review ratings. We’re still in the dark about what we all actually got though for now.
That’ll be all from me…..
Cheers Jen! – I dunno what we’d do without you.
And thats your lot I’m afraid… see you soon!
Hello readers!
Today marks the day that I complete an EOW hat-trick! Ali was down to edit today but unfortunately he’s off ill so I’ve had to step in.
I was actually going to do the Comms team update so I suppose I’ll start with.. Me!
Interesting… not often I get to quote myself!
The team have been super busy as always, mainly with this – if not the eating then the constant procession of people wanting a sample for themselves..
Ta ta!
A shoddy short update from me there, I think I just wanted to show off about the stash!
Let’s get things back on track, here’s Carl from Networks…
We’ve been working on the migration into our new Primary data center that should be complete by mid-November. This week we have moved a number of databases, moved over to brand new hardware for our usage accounting/charging platform known as CBC, moved some internal servers and been preparing for the email storage move that starts from 11pm tonight till 11pm Saturday night.
We’ve also been working on our long term solutions for Internet Transit, Wholesale broadband capacity and email storage.
Next it’s the ever reliable Jen from HR…
It’s that time in the quarter when we should have all had our performance reviews. In HR, we’ve been reminding all the managers that we need the ratings back by the end of today. We’ve also been creating reports on what everyone has been up to over the last three months from their employee records on our HR system.
On the resourcing front, it’s been all the usual stuff, such as recruitment, plus updating role profiles and the organisation charts.
The most exciting thing we’ve been doing though, is the Healthy Workplaces Week for 19th-26th October and preparations are nearly finalised. So, be prepared to stop smoking, start exercising and get eating your 5-a-day. Maybe HR could start by setting an example….(not naming any names!!).
Anyway, I’ll keep it brief. It is Friday afternoon after all. Enjoy the weekend!
And finally, Vershan from the CSC…
From the Faults guys in Sunny SA we would like to firstly congratulate Preeshan Reddy on his new role as Service Delivery Manager. Well done!!! It has been a relatively uneventful week for the team. Faults volumes have been steady while we have noticed an increase in the number of customers reporting speed problems which are related to VP issues. These issues are currently under control and are been investigated by our suppliers.
In a Nut shell everything has been under control thus far and we are looking forward towards an awesome week ahead.
Excellent, I think that’s all for now.
See you soon!
It may seem odd to write a blog about blogs. Having said that, it might also seem perfectly normal, too.
We’re proud of our blogs and hope you find them both interesting and informative. And we’re very pleased now to have been included in Online IT Degrees’ Top 100 Blogs for the industry.
You can find us in the “Top IT Industry Company Blogs” category with the likes of Digg, DELL and the Windows 7 team – which is very nice indeed.
Our blogs are important to the way we work as a company. They allow you to see what we’re interested in, and through them we can give you our take on what’s happening in the world of ISPs and the wider Internet.
On Saturday 10th October, the England football team are playing their penultimate qualifier in the Ukraine.
It will be the first time in recent history that an England qualifying match hasn’t been shown live on a ‘normal’ TV channel.
This event and the potential number of people streaming this are going to put pressure across the UK broadband networks. This could cause slower than expected speeds for everybody using the internet, including our customers.
If you want to watch you can see the game via the official stream here.
Before streaming this there are a few things you need to know prior to kick-off:
Now all that’s left is to watch England win (hopefully).
~~~~~
How to do this depends on your operating system, and which web browser you’re using.
Browser: Internet Explorer
Browser: Mozilla Firefox
Browser: Safari
Browser: Mozilla Firefox
Here at Plusnet Towers we’ve heard that some World of Warcraft players have been asking their ISPs why their gaming experience has deteriorated since installing the latest patch 3.2.2 update.
Are you a WoW player and which provider are you with? If you play regularly have you seen your gaming experience getting worse recently?
Whilst we can’t comment on the definite reasons for this we haven’t seen any widespread complaints from our customer base on this issue.
If you’re a Plusnet customer and seeing problems, all you need to do is play the game and if you’re having problems with it send us a ticket with a Wireshark capture on it and we’ll make sure the traffic is correctly prioritised.
It’s the same with any game, if you are seeing latency then just drop us a ticket with the Wireshark capture on, we’ll forward it to our traffic management gurus and they’ll see if it can be prioritised.
Chris
Risin’ up, back on the street
Did my time, took my chances
Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet
Just a man and his will to survive
So many times, it happens too fast
You change your passion for glory
Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive…
Oh yes! We’ve all gone Prizefighter mad here at work today… why? I’m sure you know by now but in case you don’t, Carl ‘The Fridge’ Baker (one of our CSC managers) is fighting Danny Williams in the Prizefighter tournament on Sky tonight!
So without further ado, let’s get on with the posts, Here’s Barbara with the HR update:
Another busy week in HR. As it’s the beginning of October we’ve completed our KPI’s , and we’ve started the ball rolling on the Q2 Performance Levelling process; we’ve even had our own Q2 1-2-1’s (just in case you thought we didn’t make ourselves do it – we do!).
We’ve also been busy with more recruitment activities including interviews and updating Org Charts.
Looking forward we’ve been making plans for the ‘Healthy Workplace Week’ and as a complete co-incidence around 12.5% of us took advantage of having an annual flu jab….so no tapping people’s arms trying to hurt them!
Honestly we’ve all gone Boxing mad, really! Maybe Rob from CSC will prove me right…
Hi This is Rob From the House Moves Team
Another week has flown by and another weekend is upon us in the Sheffield office.
We have had a busy week this week. We’ve had a few people off so we have had to work doubly hard to keep up with the work, but we pulled together and managed really well.
I’d like to take this time as well to welcome back our Song of the week – which this week is Chipmunk – Oopsie Daisy. As per request of David, we think the Alice in chains new album Deserves a honourable mention as well.
There is a massive occasion tonight that we are all looking forward to.
One of our managers is fighting in the Prizefighter Boxing Tournament his name is Carl “The Fridge” Baker and we are all a 100% behind him. COME ON CARL!!!!
There we go, just slipped it in at the end…sneaky! Lets see if James can keep it going through the Comms update…
There’s been a few odd things happening over the last week. England won their 3 ODI game in a row (thrashing the useless South African’s) before redelivering their usual form against New Zealand and (dare I say it) Australia. One of our colleagues is off to fight in a big Boxing Match on Sky!
It’s been a pretty busy week for me – I’ve been keeping my eyes on our forums as well as picking up some various other bits of work, which included mapping out our Help Assistant in Excel (don’t try this at home – it’s horrible) for our Business Improvement team so that they can easily identify some improvements we can make to it so our customers find it easier to get the information they need when looking to raise a ticket.
Bob’s basically been himself. Grumpy. Angry. Bald. He’s also been doing a lot of work on our ongoing datacentre move and looking after Network Change Controls.
I would ask Matt and Mand what they’ve been upto, but Matt’s on a half day and Mand is ill (1, 2, 3 awwwwwww). They’ve been helping out in the forums and doing various bits of task work when they’ve been in though.
Chris came back to work today (yay!) after a relaxing break. He tells me he’s done absolutely nothing with his time off, which is how all holidays should be spent. He’s been catching up today and seeing how various projects have been going on.
That’s it from me today. Don’t forget to tune into Prizefighter tonight at 9pm on Sky Sports.
Have a nice weekend mo
Nicely done sir! Right then, last but not least is Ali, from the Business Improvements team.
Here’s Ali McG from Business Improvement.
OK – I’ve got a few updates today! First, Luke’s on hol today – the lucky beggar had yesterday off, too, so he’s enjoying a nice long weekend. But earlier this week he had plenty of supplier conference calls and is in the thick of a big project to research billing and customer services contacts, as these form the biggest areas we have from our customers, whether it’s through tickets raised on the portal or phone calls.
Maria, who’s Head of Business Improvement, had a huge workshop on Monday with BT up in Newcastle, to run through where we are with ADSL2+.This exciting technology will, as you may know, eventually deliver much faster broadband speeds than we typically receive today. I’ve just had my staff account switched onto BT’s 21st Century Network, so once it stabilises I’ll let you know if I’m getting more than the 4 meg I’ve been used to.
Nick is coming to the end of his trip to our Durban call centre and whilst there he’s been doing all sorts of useful things. He has sent me a nice long list, which includes the quality acceleration plan roll out, call quality meetings, meeting with team leaders and quality managers to cascade the September Plusnet rally, he attended the weekly performance meeting and weekly internal ops meeting. He also spent a full day monitoring customer calls, a half day monitoring ticket responses and meeting with another client of the same call centre to discuss common themes. Oh and as if that was not enough, met with the Board of the call centre for lunch – perhaps to wind down from so many activities!! Just when I thought that was it, Nick sent another Jabber! He’s been meeting to discuss performance incentive ideas, and done prep and planning for the provisioning and fault trainers visiting the Durban operation in the next two months (that’s if our very own Carl Baker doesn’t win his fight tonight!!!). I actually need to lie down now I’ve typed that up.
For me, I’ve spent this week on one strategic area and also plenty of smaller things. My main focus has been looking at any quick improvements we can make to our existing phone system (the one that you, our customers call in on) – so have had plenty of emails to write and reply to, working with our suppliers. It looks like something is going to be possible, so next for me is finding out the costs and lead times involved and making sure there’s a business case for making the improvements – all of which will lead to better customer service.
With the London Campaign in full swing, I’ve also been listening in to sales calls, to help the team. I’ve been providing feedback on call quality and areas for improvement; I’ve also been noting where we’ve done a good job. My feedback will help the sales guys and will also be useful for new recruits.
We’ve also been getting quite a few wrong calls through to the sales guys, so I’ve been working with people to see how we can direct more customers to the right customer support staff, first time, and avoid having to transfer customers about.
Cheers Ali!
That’s all for this week, I’ve just got time for one last GOOD LUCK CARL – best wishes from all at Plusnet!
The PC Pro Awards 2009 were awarded last night in London. We were awarded joint third place overall for Best ISP with 5 out of the available 6 stars. Plusnet did particularly well in the ‘Customer Support’ and ‘Would you recommend?’ categories.
Zen took the honours, with O2 being highly commended, each with 6 stars.
More than 14,000 readers voted in this year’s survey, providing in-depth feedback on the products they’ve bought and the level of customer service they received.
Good evening Sportsfans!
(always wanted to say that).
All of us here at Plusnet want to say a massive GOOD LUCK to our very own Carl Baker who’s fighting in tomorrow’s Prizefighter competition at the ExCel Arena in London Docklands.
Carl’s going up against Tyson-beater Danny Williams in the second bout of boxing at 9.20pm. The Prizefighter Series Heavyweights III quarter-finals are being screened on Sky Sports 2 on Friday, October 2 from 9pm. All the action will also be shown live in high definition on Sky Sports HD 2.
There’s a great interview with Carl in today’s Sun newspaper.
G’waaan Carl. You can do it!!
You’re probably getting used to these announcements by now but we’re pleased to announce that this morning we lit yet *another* 155Mbps segment of central capacity.
That’s hot on the heels of the one we lit three weeks ago, and the four we added throughout July and August.
This is the third segment of the current 622Mbps BT Central (there are four segments in total) and will be shared 2:1 between the Plusnet and Madasafish networks.
Anybody connecting to the new segment will see their traffic passing through the gateway known as thn-ag01. You can find out what gateway you’re connected to by running a traceroute or using the Gateway Checker on the Usertools website (this might not work if you’re a Madasafish customer).
When adding new capacity it can take some time for the network to ‘balance’ i.e. distribute users evenly across gateways. In order to accelerate this process it is sometimes necessary for us to temporarily disconnect a small number of customers from the Internet. We’ve no intention of doing this at the moment but if that changes we’ll let you know via our Service Status and Twitter feeds.
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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