Good evening from a thawed-out Manchester (and from being in Sheffield yesterday, the streets of brown Slush Puppy are once again back to being Tarmac as well). The weather has been so glorious in Manchester today – a sultry 7 degrees - that I may do some gardening on my balcony this weekend. Most of my efforts from last year have died (due to neglect and bugs, but not the snow), so it’s about time I had a mid-winter spruce up I think. It was about minus 15 this time last week, so because it’s been so warm today, I worked from home in shorts, T-shirt and sunglasses. I didn’t really, as that would have been ridiculous. OK, enough rubbish and on with the show!! First, we have Andy from Digital Care:
Hello readers! It's been a while, it's my first post of the year and I do believe it's the first post of the year from our team. Did you have a good break?I certainly did (apart from the rubbish illness at the end of it) but now we're all back and working hard. Most of the team has been focusing on our Live Chat trial this week. If you've been looking to raise a ticket this week then some of you may have already spoke to Chris, Matt, Bob (yes his name really is Bob!) or Mand - if so then I'm sure you'll agree that they've done a great job so far. Mand’s had problems getting into work due to all the ice. PJ has spent much of the week in meetings, while preparing 1-2-1 reports for the team and practicing his best smile for the visit of John Petter (our CEO's boss @ BT and currently head of BT Consumer). That just leaves me, I've been mainly looking at our broadband speed support pages (both the faults and informational ones), ploughing through KPI reports and bugging our QA manager to find out when I'll be able to publish some updates to the Member Centre. That's about it I think... there's been some snow too. Things got a bit slippy for a while but we're ok now, although I think Mand's been stuck in her local village for about 3 weeks! Bye for now, see you next week!
Thanks Andy, and now for an update from Business Improvement… first up it’s James:
This week I’ve been working on a live problem investigation for a project we rolled out recently, as well as looking at new activations [Ed: this means as in activating new customers’ accounts] and working with our South Africa provisioning team, managing our record sign ups that we’ve had this week - ending week in a very good position.
[Ed: I should point out that this week we saw our best-ever day for sales, which is testament to the fact that all our exciting marketing activities are starting to pay massive dividends. This is an exciting time for Plusnet!] Meanwhile here’s what Luke has been up to:
So another hectic week in PN Towers. This week I have specified a faults dashboard so we can see in great detail how we and our suppliers are performing on a range of fault areas. This is key as we look to have more customers on the new 'up to 20Mb' network. I then had the mind -blowingly numb task of specifying the exact criteria and what feeds in to it on our system for each field and how that should be calculated. Yesterday and today I have been doing some resource forecasting based on fault volumes and how often we call our supplier with regards to faults. Looking forward to some mighty fine ales this evening. Much needed. Have a great weekend all and enjoy the thaw!!!
Thanks Luke - the final nugget from BI is from me:
Finally, I have worked on a number of things this week… firstly, preparing for a workshop next Monday afternoon to meet with a phone system supplier. We’re wanting to update our customer support centre’s (CSC’s) phone system, as the kit we have in now just doesn’t meet our business needs any more. We’re looking at many options and Monday’s meeting will run through some of the latest technologies. I’ve also been helping the sales team with two recruitment days, so that we are ready for the next batch of marketing activity and able to keep up with all the calls! So I got the chance to do some assessments, role plays and three interviews. It was quite nice to be the interviewer instead of the interviewee! I’ve done some work around knowledge management, too – which is us working towards a new way of collating all of Plusnet’s operational customer support knowledge into one place. That will also be covered off in the supplier meeting on Monday, as we look around for a good solution. After such a busy week at Plusnet with a visit from John Petter, Company Rally, interruption to our entire water supply, record number of sales, plus all the usual busyness, I think everyone deserves a relaxing weekend!
Have a good one and talk you again soon, Ali McGowan