Monday 2nd March

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I'm tempted to write 'it's the start of another week' but working at the weekend does tend to make the concept of a start and end to the week feel a bit arbitrary.   Don't feel too sorry for me though (as if!). I had a most excellent weekend and I hope you did too.  Of course, working at the weekend is nothing new for the support staff here.  Let's start with them today.   Oliver, what's been happening in the CSC today? Hey Guys, Wow, I hope everyone had a great weekend and enjoyed the sunshine and the slightly warmer weather, I know we have up in Sheffield. Monday is of course one of our busiest days in the CSC with many customers raising queries with us after the weekend and business customers coming back into work. Following the launch of the new Plusnet broadband products we have been seeing a gradual but marked increase in all of our workflows; from provisioning to customer services and of course technical support. The CSC have pulled together fantastically over the last couple of weeks since the launch and are handling the extra work really well. As you can imagine this has pushed some of the response and call wait times up slightly for customers but rest assured that won't last forever  We have had a good selection of issues throughout the day, many of these sales orientated on the back of the new products but here's a breakdown of the top daily issues;

1. Sales: This has been the big word of the day throughout the department, answering many queries on the new packages from both existing and prospective customers coming into the Plusnet family.
2. Faults: We have been chatting to quite a few customers today regarding speed issues, many of which have been a secondary issue to an intermittent connection. This is one of the more common issues we have and dropping connections will sometimes cause the speed to drop. Of course with all faults, we have had quite a few requests for updates today based on problems raised to us last week.
3. Billing: With the introduction of the new products and of course the area based pricing, this has caused a small amount of confusion for some customers and we have been confirming this throughout the day for quite a few of our members.
4. General Configuration: Not as popular as usual today but certainly still one of the bread and butter issues we deal with everyday. Don't forget people there're full instructions for email setups on the help and support section and if you're considering a new router the settings are also on there to make a note of, making setting these up really swift and easy.

Well that's all from me for today! Hope you all have a great evening and if you need to give us a call the support team will be happy to help at any time!   Nice update Oliver. Thanks for that. Here's Veroshan now with an update from the Provisioning team: The Prov team has had a very eventful week, due to the high number of tickets in our pools.  Our agents have done a good job under the wing of our acting Team Leaders Vas and Roxanne. It has been very assuring to see the Prov team do an exceptional job without our ringleader Rohan. Looking toward seeing even more improvements this week. On the down we seem to be receiving many LLU migrations in our Phone provisioning pool although these customers have BT lines, so we would have to contact each of these customers just to confirm if they have requested for phone service which is a bit time consuming. So if we could reduce this on sign-up it would be extremely helpful. (Sounds like you've got some ideas there Veroshan. Make sure you raise them in the Ideas tool in Workplace or in the forums - Ed) Hats off to our Prov team once again for the past week.   Over in Business Support here's Mark C: Today has been busy as always but sadly Martin had to go home half way through a shift so we have been a man down all day. Phil has been working with one of our partners on his day off (this guy never goes home!) while Chris has been trying to keep faults up to date. I wanted to have a nice easy day due to the previous night's events but with the number of calls it has not been that easy. Mick is wearing a pink shirt and I don't think I need to say anything else on this matter.   And (don't faint now readers) here's Neil with Networks: It's been a hectic day in Networks today. I'm looking after the whole of the Ops team whilst John suns himself in the Caribbean for the next couple of weeks so have been keeping on top of things and helping my guys out with tickets when I can. Steve in IT is building PC after PC for the new sales staff we have joining us. It's mainly been problems over in Ops, and monitoring of course. Lots of other things coming out of Netdev with the main focus still being the move from one of our soon to be old data centres! More from us later....   Great stuff.  Last but not least here's Smiling Bob with Comms: We've been a man down today as Chris is out of the office enjoying the latter part of an extended weekend. Meanwhile, the rest of us have been beavering away at the usual barrage of Monday morning work. Mand's been reviewing development change controls, looking after problem management and writing some documentation. Matt's been concentrating on 'task work', James has been keeping an eye on the forums and Pete's been reveling in the joys of Excel. I've been reviewing network change controls and trying to keep on top of particularly nasty problem we've been working hard to fix. Having noticed the custom logo Google have on their search page today I now know that it's Dr. Seuss' 105th birthday. That leads me nicely to the random link of the day which for the reasons I've just cited has to be this one.   Don't forget, if you've got any questions you'd like to ask our new CEO you can pop them into the forum thread here.  I'll be collating these later this week so there's still time to ask away. Peter