Bob has done his usual email stuff today for the nth day running. Magical.

James says it’s half past three. Not sure why, maybe he’s got a new watch or something? Other than telling me the time, which is already in the bottom corner of my screen, he’s been blogging and poking around some forums. Tremendous.

Mand has been rahhhhhing. Stupendous. (Ed: No, I don’t know either!)

Matt’s been shoulder deep, it would be knee but he’s only ikkle, in emails, meetings and problems. He also makes a completely unfounded claim that he’s been helpful. Delightful.

I’ve been in and around a few forums, writing another blog (watch this space) and making the *only* tea round today. Magnificent.

While peer reviewing this EOD for me, Bob made an even more outrageous claim than that of Matt. I’ll paste the conversation below.

[15:39:52] <Bob Pullen> I made tea before you all got here
[15:40:08] <Chris Parr> that’s not a tea round then is it
[15:40:11] <Chris Parr> that’s a cup of tea
[15:40:25] <Bob Pullen> i made four
[15:40:28] <Bob Pullen> and drank them all

So with all that said, the only thing left to do is give you the comms link.

Half three? Slackers! That’s not the end of the day! Perhaps we’ll find out what else they did today tomorrow? Anyway, next is Catherine from the QA Team

In further biscuit shenanigans, we discovered that Rich Teas don’t have much momentum, although Matt 2 did suggest cutting one into a star for a tasty shuriken. In actual work news, Nigel is still off with whatever nasty bug is felling people at the minute and Matt 1 has been working from home so, while he’s doubtless been ploughing through problems like a fiend, he’s not actually been here to share in our ninja/baked goods fun. That leaves Paul, who has been working with one of our many Ben’s on some improvements to the product tool. It also leaves Matt 1 and Gary who have been working on a project with our Indian staff Rugmini and Babitha and Gavin, who has been doing some more being chilled out, picking the right lunch and generally doing the stuff that he does. Finally, it leaves me, who has been working on some WLR problems and I’ve just picked up a P1 for Rowan. Good night everyone, I’m off till next Tuesday

Holidays! Who approved that? Finally, Kev from Cancellations

It’s been a fairly quiet day, mostly because Darren has been in meetings with Kelly for a lot of the day. We have been busy none the less helping customers onto the best packages and generating MAC keys as well.

Sally is working with our Business customers, with myself and Paul working alongside our colleagues in South Africa with any queries and cancellation requests.

Heather and Laura are both working on provisioning today and assisting whenever they can with others work flows.

Joe hasn’t been making tea (Ed: This company is Tea obsessed…) as much today it seems, hopefully that will change soon as the team require it at least once an hour. Last, but not least, Adam has been in charge today with Kelly and Darren in meetings today,

That’s pretty much everything from me, hope you all enjoy your evening. Paul and I are here on the late shift for the rest of the day, hopefully no-one will ruin the England score before i can see the highlights!

–
All done! I’m off climbing now. Have a nice evening.

This thought led me to an experiment to try and prove that time travel will be possible within my own lifetime. Not quite Sam Beckett, I don’t have a Quantum Leap accelorator, yet, but instead created a random experiment. Selected six numbers at random from 49 and placed them in an envelope in my flat and then put the remaining 43 in a second envelope. I did not look at either set of numbers. The envelopes were left for two days before I took the six numbers out and bought a lottery ticket using those numbers.

The thinking is that as a time traveller you’d be able to interfere in a random event without causality throwing a wobbler because you’d just be guiding that random event to one that was as equally likely as any other. i.e. travel back in time and select the six winning numbers and replace them in the envelope while I’m not home, therefore not meeting myself in the process.

Now, the question is, did I win? Well the first time I tried I realised I’d made a mistake so didn’t… but the second. Well we’ll find out on Saturday…

That’s enough trying to pad out the end of day so let’s start off with Chris from Customer Services:

Hello, Chris here from the customer services team.

The countdown to Christmas has now begun (37 days) as the reindeer races have now begun. The customer service team have voted in their numbers, and with 50% of the votes we have now called our reindeer PERDITO! We now all know the name of the reindeer that will win the race.

If you do not know about the race, please visit here.

It has been a very busy but productive day myself and other members of the team.

I have been driving CSC performance via floor management. Mark has been in finance for the afternoon assisting with finance tickets. James has been working on Hardware and standard CS tickets, and whilst the rest of the troops have been taking calls.

Thats all from me and have a good evening.

Next, from QA is Catherine:

It’s a short week for me as I had yesterday off due to illness (I spent pretty much all of it asleep) and I’m off on Thursday and Friday. So, what have we been up to? The usual mix of projects, problem testing and finding excuses not to do our POMS tasks
Here are some snapshots from the day instead:
- Gavin selects the best lunch from the team, so having what he’s got is a good bet.
- Stephen only likes macho biscuits. Hob Nobs are the most macho biscuits and face tea with valour and might, whereas Rich Tea are feeble and crumble in just the steam.
- Gary has been singing today - earlier it was ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
- I discovered that listening to chilled out swing music puts me in a better mood than my usual ‘being shouted at by angry Finnish people’. (Ed: I’ll be listening to Chidren of Bodom later, thanks Catherine).

Have a good evening!

And last for today is Bob from the Comms Team:

Today I have been mainly suffering at my desk (yes, it is self inflicted). When not feeling sorry for myself I’ve been reviewing networks change controls and keeping tabs on the IronPort anti-spam project.

Chris has been drafting an email and been keeping on top of the fourms, James has been helping him out and working on a blog post, whilst Matt has continued work on the Madasafish newsletter.

Random link of the day is here following a bit of inspiration from artmo in the forums.

And that’s all for today folks, we’re out of here until tomorrow. I’m off to go and decide where I’m going on holiday in February, somewhere warm, relatively cheap and not too far away are the criteria, unless the lottery win comes in then it’s warm, who cares about the cost and so long as I can get the first class it doesn’t matter how far, any suggestions welcome. Have fun everyone…

Paul from the Cancellations team is first in line today…

Good afternoon, Paul from cancellations here

The nights are drawing in and the Christmas lights were turned on in Sheffield city centre yesterday. Just to think that there is only 37 days left to get shopping But really my attention should be on what we’ve been up to today, as per usual Sal has been dealing with our business customers keeping them happy. Daz,Adam,Kev,Joe and Heather have been all hands to the phone with Monday being our busiest day. Myself, i have been dealing with our South African colleagues and help where i can. The boss lady even made a round of drinks today (highly unusual) The other main point of the day has been trying to decide on a name that you can call a reindeer (besides the obvious: rudolph,donner and blitzen etc) This is down to a staff incentive we are running over the christmas period

Well i think thats all from me for today

If you want to help name the Reindeer, then be sure to check out Reindeer Races and let Andrew know!

James from the ProductsComms team (people really need to stop changing jobs!) is up next:

So it’s a welcome back to Comms in the traditional way of being made/asked to write the EoD! It’s starting to feel a bit wintry here in Sheffield, so armed with my scarf and trusty winter coat I’ve just about managed to struggle through the cold and looking forward to my nice centrally heated flat!

I’ve been mainly catching up with the forums today as well as doing a few tickets for some of our Business Customers.
Chris has been looking at the Customer Satisfaction survey, writing service statuses and posting in our forums.
Bob has mainly spent his time looking at Ironport.
Mand has been toiling away with development change control, writing an email and looking into some problems.

That’s it from us, barring the random link…
…and surprisingly, coming from me, it’s fairly boring.

Coming soon to XBOX Live near you: http://www.xbox.com/en-gb/live/NXE/

James

Finally today, it’s Andrew from the Web Dev department:

Ey up and seasons greetings to all who read the EOD today! The Christmas lights were turned on in Sheffield yesterday and according to the Radio DJ who was compering the event, it’s officially Christmas as soon as the switch is flicked. As a traditional sort this annoys me as we’re barely halfway through November but I digress - You want to know what we’ve been up to huh?

Nick has returned to the office after a week off with severe lurgy, so he’s been catching up with what he’s missed and getting back into the swing of things.

I’ve been putting the finishing touches to a problem fix I was working on last week and dividing the rest of my time between creating a new hardware insert, support work for our Business Product refresh and planning out a new structure for our email support section.

Mark and Phil have been working on the Line Checker project - this will provide a speed estimate to new customers when they sign up.

James has been squishing bugs on the community site as well as making preparations to upgrade its software.

Sam is as usual on Business Refresh duties, Gary hasn’t responded but he’s usually on the same these days!

Duffy continues to wade through problems, and Colin… well Colin’s the editor today so he can tell you himself.

Finally…Bergerac.

That’ll be all for now!

Today, I’ve been trying to write a new report for the CSC and deal with some problem work too…

That’s all for me… I’m off to see the Christmas Lights!

Colin

As we’re approaching the festive season I’ve been offered some prize Community Site real estate to impart some truly exciting news on the plans that one of Santa’s performance-focused management elves has developed as a Christmas Incentive for the CSC here at Plusnet Towers.

We have it on good authority from Santa’s list of who’s been naughty and nice that there are going to be plenty of 802.11n wireless routers, dongles and shiny new MacBooks beautifully wrapped and nestling beneath Christmas trees this year. So we anticipate that we’ll be getting a few calls from stressed-out customers who’ll need a little bit of extra help (but remember if you can get online, our Support Pages offer a wealth of information!)

To ensure that we’re in tiptop shape to handle this influx, we’re going to need to work a little bit smarter, so Santa has agreed to lend us 6 of his reindeer to help drive performance. Each one will be assigned to a team in the CSC, and we’ve given this novel scheme the imaginative title of ‘Reindeer Races’, or ‘Racing Reindeer’ depending on which PowerPoint slide you’re looking at. Depending on how well we do, Santa will reward our seconded reindeer based on a range of performance metrics, including:

• top performing team per week
• ensuring all analysts hit target each day for the shift pattern
• timekeeping – ensuring less than 2% lates per week
• maintaining CAR at above 85% (this is the number of calls we handle - the Call Answer Rate)
• keeping the longest call wait below 10 mins
• retaining customers
• attaining over 110% performance for the week

To give you a bit more background on where we’re going with this, our caribou contrived catalyst is based upon the concept of ‘Reindeer Dust’ – which is something those of you who can remember the mid 1980’s Christmas caper ‘Santa Claus: The Movie’ will understand without further explanation. In fact, the less we discuss said highlight of American cinema, the better. Moving swiftly on…

So, each week Santa will distribute to the top performing substitute Saami several bags of reindeer dust based upon performance, and at the end of the races we anticipate that there’ll be one, pre-eminent bunch of support analysts who’ll be enjoying an exceptional, un-Scrooge-like festive period with their reindeer in tow.

Now, for the tricky maths part. Each performance indicator attracts a certain remuneration, ranging from a paltry 5 bags of dust for achieving the Herculean feat of keeping the CAR above 85%, to a stonking 20 bags of dust for the comparably effortless cakewalk of attaining 110% team performance across a shift pattern. The elves over at Lapland bank (it must be on the verge of collapse if it’s taking dust as deposits, however magical) will then convert 100 bags of reindeer dust into a crisp £20 for the victors to spend on a team building event ranging from the humble takeaway to more profligate pastimes such as go-karting or paintballing days out. 

One final note before we start – Santa’s not releasing his First Team of Reindeer as he needs these fresh for Christmas Eve. So we’re currently sat with Reindeer Team A, B, C, Faults, Sales and Customer Service; but they’re sulking a bit and we need to cheer them with new names. If any of you creative lot have any suggestions please do let us know.

Thanks for reading

Andy

So let’s get on with the show and start off an action packed End of Day with the CSC top 5 from Ben:

1. Router configuration
It’s no surprise to see this one retaining it’s number 1 position, as a lot of customers are getting stuck with their router configuration. I think that a lot of calls used to be logged as username / password verification when a customer tried to get themselves online and just needed their details correcting. However these calls are now being pushed into more detailed router configuration setups when we need to perform factory resets to allow customers access to the setup pages of the router.

2. Wireless setups
We’re now supplying wireless routers as an option during the signup process for all of our Broadband Your Way accounts, meaning that more customers are able to take advantage of this feature. This is provoking a lot of calls in from customers who are already online who now want to connect up without using a cable. We’re limited with the technical support that we can provide for this, but we always do our best to get our customers connected.

3. New faults
There have been no major issues or service outages reported today, just the normal mix of faults comprised of no synchronisation, intermittent synchronisation and speed faults. Most of the synchronisation faults are easily resolved by the usual master socket checks and the speed faults are easily identified as usage issues or they are related to a dropping connection.

4. Email problems
Everything to do with email is being lumped in here as there have been no specific issues prompting calls, just a large number of customers needing help getting their accounts set up or help resolving all sorts of different problems with sending or receiving email.

5. Provisioning updates
We’re seeing a few delayed orders today, some caused by BT, but also some caused by delays with hardware delivery. It’s hard for us to deal with these calls as they invariably require interaction with either another department within the company, our warehouse or BT.

Second today is Rys from Dev:

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. Since my last hello in an EOD, I’ve been hilariously ill (chest infection and flu) and hilariously busy, taking over primary development of a project, along with a bit of management of its remote team.

Getting my head around new code, new project practices and new people meant that come 5.30 in recent weeks I’ve not only missed my EOD post window, but all I’ve want to do is flee the keyboard and do something else completely unrelated to work.

The project encompasses our partner and reseller businesses from a dev point of view, and it runs at quite a different pace from my previous project, but things are calmed down enough now that I can think about doing these again. Good times!

Outside of that, there’s heavy focus on our revision control and alpha integration environment changes. They’re progressing well, and we’re getting to that stage where their work is common quite a bit of the time, as the two converge and we get close to a first release.

Elsewhere we’ve got WBMC streams ongoing, some changes to our PHP framework, account change improvements and myriad other bits and pieces. Oh, and a new boss! Check the community site for more about that, exciting times indeed.

Now for the Comms Team end of Day it’s Mand:

Today we’ve been orbrey-less as he’s off gallavanting in Edinburgh.

So, Bob, Chris and I have battled on, with our daily activities being as follows:

Chris: Forums, blogging (about forums), and analysing our Customer Satisfaction Survey, which we’ll publish the results of on Monday for you.

Bob: When I asked him he simply replied ‘Port!’. I’ll assume that he means the ongoing Ironport work, rather than the drinking of Port. But with Bob you just never know. I happen to know he’s also worked on a few Networks Change Controls this afternoon.

Mand: I’ve been working on Development Change Controls, Home Phone special offer work, clearing out my tasks ready for a new week, and chasing up a couple of tricky Openreach escalations.

It being Friday I thought I’d give you an update on Bob’s grievance.txt issue, and a scoreboard:

CParr 16
Mand 6
Matt 2
Group efforts 4

We’ve also (just) welcomed James back to the team, after his stint in our Product team.

Anyway, it’s Friday evening and t’pub is calling, so we’ll leave you with a random link and a cheerio. Cheerio.

Next today Gav from Marketing:

This week we’ve expanded our offer of Home Phone for £1.99 for 3 months (when taken with broadband on a 12 month contract). This is now available on Option 1 through uSwitch and Option 2, Option 3 and pro to all customers.

Chris has been planning new referrals handouts, as requested by our customers here.

We’ve also been working on a seasonal refresh for the site, which we hopefully will be implemented soon.

Have a good weekend all,

Gav

And a very special treat, an EOW from our forum moderation team:

Deep from the bowels of Mod central…

<FloatingHead> Ya know, we should get in on this EOD malarkey, what have you guys been doing recently?
<DrPenguin> Quotes… Quotes.. the bane of my life.. /twitch
<TheStudent> I think I’ve nearly managed to get my iPhone to work prop…….
<ForumPlod> Doh, there goes another post mangled by TheStudent
<FloatingHead> Sigh.. alright guys, you seem busy. Leave it to me.

The forums have been fairly busy this week, with some interesting threads developing. Top of my list would be the speed problems thread (naturally it’s top - it’s my thread!). If you believe you’ve been suffering from speed problems, dive in and post your details so we can collate as much information as possible.

Cream of the crop currently in the Offtopic forum is certain words - Do you have problems with spelling certain words? Let us know what they are and you might win a prize!*

Last but not least we’re looking for more victims, uh.. I mean volunteers to help moderate the forums. Interested in helping out? Check out this thread for details of the Moderators Elections that will be running soon!

Have a great weekend, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

FloatingHead

* By the way, I may have fibbed a little about the prize, but let us know anyway!

Nige next introducing you to the software platform team:

The software platform team gets its own EOD slot, mawaaahhhhh!….I mean: Hello everyone.

We’re the guys who beaver away making sure the software which runs our business systems is secure, scalable and matches our technological and strategic goals. The work is a good mix of hands on coding, architectural design, technical innovation, oversight and mentoring. It’s also my perfect job.

Today’s been fairly typical: Bill has been improving how our billing system reacts if the payment processing system we use isn’t available. I’ve been handling a range of design/implementation queries from the guys working on the new account change application and planning tutorials to reduce the training overhead, freeing me to do other things. We may be needing those training guides soon, which makes producing them seem even more worthwhile. Who says you can’t expand in a recession?

Happy Friday, all.

Penultimate entry for today comes from Phil in Business Support:

How do all from Business Support.

Another good day on the grind today, with a 100% call answer rate as I speak (no, that isn’t a challenge) and a full team, though Fridays are always the best and quietest.

So today,
Myself - Plenty of faults, plenty of tickets and a good sprinkling of calls
Mark - Looking busy, because he technically isn’t here
Chris - Speed fault junky and helping the residential faults team
Adam - Contacting customers about high volumes of email in “unspecified” mailboxes, not an easy task
Jon - Attending the Plusnetter of the month meeting and customer tickets
Martin - Logged faults reports for the most part

Have a good weekend folks, we are off to relax in our favourite spot.

And lastly but certainly not leastly, brought to you by Jen…this week in HR…

We’ve seen a flurry of returned 6 month performance reviews. Keep up the good work guys!

Barbs has been busy sifting through lots of old documents on our HR and Legal filestore and generally having a good old Spring Clean (although not much could convince us it’s Spring). She’s also been sorting out HR security for managers, that is, what info managers can and can’t see.

She and Amanda have also been trying to look after our welfare by arranging for an afternoon of optional ‘flu jabs for all staff here at Internet House. Meanwhile, Gem’s been doing the absence report…hopefully the ‘flu jab’ll have a positive effect on that!!

Gem and Amanda have both been working on role profile reviews. Plus, they’ve both been supporting Products and Marketing with departmental changes. CSC have been making shift and role changes so Gem’s been supporting that too.

Amanda has been continuing with 360° and she also managed to get out and about for 2 days to attend the BT HR meeting for Consumer & Enterprises.

I’ve still been trying to sort out the Christmas party…just waiting for the final few to come back with their responses now! And making sure our Lealta benefits cards are on their way to us in time for a bit of discounted Christmas shopping.

Childcare vouchers are now a go-go and we’re set to have the first lot of employees receive this benefit following their next pay. I’ve also been sorting out offer forms for our CSC temps who are joining us on the Plusnet payroll as of next week. Welcome!

Anyway, think that’s all from me today…seems like I’ve waffled on.

Waffle? Me? Never!

Not a chance Jen… my turn for a bit of waffle methinks. It’s 8pm and long should I have gone home so I won’t be saying all that much now, just suffice it to say enjoy the weekend folks and have fun. We’ll be back on Monday with all the news you want to hear, or something like that anyway. Have fun!

Whilst it’s always sad to say goodbye to a friend, and a good friend he has been to us all here at Plusnet, it’s also exciting to look to the future and know that we’re in good hands.  I’m pleased to be able to tell you that Anthony Vollmer (pictured), currently General Manager of Voice Propositions in BT Retail’s consumer division, will take over the helm, as the new CEO of PlusNet from Monday, 17 November 2008.

Neil will stick around until the end of December to make sure that it’s a smooth transition and I’m sure that he’ll pop in here before he goes to give a personal farewell.

There are some changes too at the very top, with John Petter, Managing Director of BT Retail’s Consumer Division, becoming Plusnet’s Chairman and current Chairman Jon Hurry stepping down but remaining on the Board of Directors.

I think that today’s announcement demonstrates once more our parent company’s enthusiasm about Plusnet and, together with my colleagues here, I’m looking forward to working with Anthony to continue to provide you with the very best Internet services and customer service.

So let’s start with the why. What are the reasons we participate in forum conversations?

I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail here. I suppose for me one of the main reasons we are in the forums is that they act as a barometer for how we are performing. Generally people who participate in forums are going to be the same people who tell you when things are going well, or not so well. We use this feedback to poke, prod and push from within the business to make sure things get fixed and make sure you are happy.

We’ve been referred to as ‘customer-centric’ or that we are ‘advocating the customer experience’, but to be honest, that’s not the type of phrases we use. In our opinion it’s simple good customer service, if you’re happy then we’re happy. If you’re not happy then we try to sort it out to satisfy both you and us.

By keeping an eye around the forums we can often pick up generic issues before the CSC can spot a pattern and therefore ensure that the correct amount of focus and priority is given to any problems we raise on the back of this.

We can also use the forums to generate discussion on trials and ideas that are being looked at. The Plusnet Usergroup (PUG) run something called PUGIT over on their site where you can suggest improvements, point out problems and bring up ideas.

There are many other things we can pick up on from the forums including escalated ticket responses and identifying where the CSC need educating on certain areas. 

So, which forums do we monitor?

As well as our Community Site forums which are the main area we focus in, there are various external forums including (in no particular order):

Thinkbroadband.com
Plusnet Usergroup
Moneysupermarket.com
MoneySavingExpert.com
Kitz.co.uk

There are many, many others which we also pop into from time to time.

How do you keep an eye on all those forums?

Everyone has their own method, so I can’t really give a definitive way. I tend to use a tabbed browser and open the main forums when I come into the office in the morning. Most forums have an ‘unread posts’ link which can be very useful when you don’t want to have to go through multiple topics or forums that may not have been responded to. The quieter forums I tend to check once or twice a day and have these all bookmarked so I can just quickly look over and see if there are any major issues that need addressing.

I also have a whiteboard stood up behind me which has a list of the main topics currently ongoing that need our attention; this gives everyone that walks past my desk an easy way to see what the customers are talking about.

Role of the moderators.

Our forums are completely moderated by a group of volunteer customers, not staff. We leave the moderation to the customers as this ensures an impartial viewpoint on issues and means that no subjects are taboo. Well, except for those that break the forum rules that is

In fact, this blog has come at a good time as there are currently moderator elections taking place which you can get involved in here. 

I hope this blog has given you an insight into our use of forums and why we find them an extremely valuable source of information.

Until next time,

Chris

First up, here’s Matt from Comms:

Here is a bash.org inspired summation of today’s conversation on the other side of the desk to Mand and me.

Chris: INSULT
Bob: MOAN
Bob: RETURN INSULT
Chris: RETORT
Bob: COUNTER RETORT PLUS ADDITION TO GRIEVANCE.TXT
Chris throws a sachet of sauce at Bob
Bob: MOAN PLUS ADDITION TO GRIEVANCE.TXT

…and loop until ready to stab one’s own eyes out.

Well that’s been about the size of it for the week, but as I’m off tomorrow to visit the frozen north (well, Edinburgh) I don’t really mind.

Other than random snipings, I’ve been trying to get the newsletter ready for sending but it’s not going to happen this week. As such I’ve been in forums, have attended to a few change controls and also had a few meetings today.

Chris has been blogging (a lot of blogging) and reading from/posting in forums. Bob has been frustrated at every turn in his attempts to work by the dark side forces (otherwise known as meetings) and Mand has been sorting problems. She’s also been in one or two meetings, has done some task work and looking at the WLR (home phone, that is) special offers.

Oh okay, okay… random linkage. I liked last night’s link so much that I’m tempted to put it in again, but I won’t. Instead you can have a similar style game from a different site (one that I’ve lost a fair number of hours to as well) - click here!

Thanks Matt! I shall be trying your link later.

Next we’ve James in Web Development:

Here’s a short round up of today’s events in Web Dev… First up, Gary has been creating wireframes for new projects and tackling some bugs.

Sam has been working on flow charts and journey plans for Business products.

Phil has been developing bits and pieces for beta support on Speed Checker.

Wojtek has been working on various design tasks on the upgrade process and other NADs.

Mark has been looking at content related material on Speed Checker and on the Business brand refresh.

Finally I’ve been continuing to revamp the Help Assistant application.

Thats it folks!

James

Thanks James! That’s all for today - have a great evening.

Ali McGowan

Now I must admit to not knowing much about this up until now so for the benefit of those in a similar position, here’s a bit of background…

Back in October the Internet bank Icesave (the UK branch of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki) was declared in default by the Financial Services Authority, leaving more than 300,000 savers waiting for compensation payouts.

On the same day the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that he had put in place arrangements to ensure that no retail depositor would lose any money as a result of Icesave’s closure.

A couple of weeks later the Financial Services Compensation Scheme announced that an accelerated process was being defined that would allow Icesave UK customers the opportunity to claim back their savings. Last week the FSCS started sending emails to Icesave customers containing information about how to claim back there savings.

You might at this point be wondering what relevance any of this has to Plusnet? Well, if you’ve read the two forum posts I linked to above then you’ll already know that the email the FSCS sent out became the victim of our Postini anti-spam filters.

Courtesy of a handful of kind forum-dwellers (thanks RobAllen, Paul03 & gofaster), I managed to get a glimpse of one of these emails, and could immediately see why the message had been marked as spam.

Here’s a line from the headers of one of these emails which were sent from an fscs.org.uk address by email marketing outfit Hearfrom:

X-pstn-levels: (S: 0.13289/99.31564 CV:99.9999 R:95.9108 P:95.9108 M:95.5423 C:98.6951 )

The number highlighted in bold is the spam score and anything under 0.15 is likely to get identified as spam. There’s more about our spam scoring mechanisms here for anybody that’s interested.

So why did the message get marked as spam then? Well, due to Postini being a proprietary anti-spam solution I couldn’t really say to be sure, but Charles Arthur of the Guardian offers an interesting take on the situation here.

In his blog, Charles speculates that to a spam filter the email from the FSCS looks nothing more than your typical 419 scam. An interesting observation, and it certainly casts doubt over the effectiveness of using electronic communication for important financial notices like this.

Even more interesting is a comment from Julian Shersby further down the page, whose email to Charles it would seem formed the basis of his article. Julian goes on to say:

“As to the emails from hearfrom.com three discussion threads in the http://www.moneysavingexpert.com show that these have been almost universally blocked as spam or blocked completely by nearly all major ISPs and the FSCS should clearly arrange for them to be sent again by a competent emailing house not associated with unwanted bulk spam and/or also send these letters to account holders in the post too.”

So here we have a reputable financial outfit sending out a pretty important piece of communication via email as opposed to post. Not only this, but the message has very ’spammy’ characteristics and doubt has also been cast over the reputation of the company used to dispatch the emails.

Should the FSCS have sent this communication via snail mail, or would the money associated with doing this be better spent elsewhere considering the circumstances? I also wonder if the FSCS have used Hearfrom’s services before and if they bothered to send any test messages before the live mailshot?

So what can you do if you’re an Icesave customer who hasn’t received your email?

Well to begin with the FSCS were advising customers who hadn’t received the email by Friday 7th November to contact them on 0845 7300 131

They seem to have since done a bit of a u-turn since then though judging by the post here where they advise customers who haven’t received there email that they will:

“publish a further update in the next few days.”

They also go on to say that they

“have been talking with a number of Internet Service Providers.”

We’re yet to here from the FSCS, but there are a few things you can check if you’re a Plusnet customer and haven’t yet received your email.

Firstly check you spam settings using the Manage My Mail tool available on our website. This will tell you if you have spam filtering switched on and if so, where the spam will be getting delivered. Chances are if you’ve never looked here before your spam will be getting moved to a ‘Spam’ folder that can be accessed using our Webmail Service. You’ll find more detail about how to access this ‘Spam’ folder here.

The second thing you can do is more a reactive measure for any further emails that the FSCS might send. Assuming the from address will be from a similar email address as the first message, then you can whitelist fscs.org.uk to make sure that any emails from the domain bypass our spam filters. This is also done using the Manage My Mail tool as can be seen below.

Did you also know that we’re going to be switching to IronPort for our anti-spam filtering soon? If not then head over here where you can get the low-down on the latest developments.

.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Comms Team

You may have seen recently that we’ve updated some of the My Referrals pages on the website so that everything is easier to find and understand.

We’ve also just launched a special offer giving you £25 for every 2 people that join us on your recommendation in November. So, if someone has already joined us on your recommendation in November then you only need to find one more person and we’ll send you the money.

You’ll still get your regular monthly discounts too - for every month that each of your friends remain a customer.

We’ll make sure the cheque is in the post well before Christmas giving you time to grab a few last minute Christmas treats on us.

Find out more about the offer over in the Member Centre.