I've been blessed with the opportunity to do my own bit of EOD editing and I'd love to tell you that we've decided that enough is enough from the doughnut front, but unfortunately, Marketing (and our Referrals Manager in particular) seem to be obsessed with them! Either way, here comes todays EOD, coming to you live (or a bit later if you're only just tuning in) from Internet House in sunny Sheffield. As ever, we've got the usual updates from various departments across the business and I'm sure, alike me, you won't be able to wait for tomorrows installment! Customer Support Centre: Steve from the CSC has given us a rather unique top 5. Unique, because there are actually 6 items! Prov Updates - Customers getting delayed house moves is a major one with customers not believing they're getting adequate updates on when the line should become active. Also orders with BT not completing on the original dates and delayed on average 3-4 days which is not usually a common problem. Would be great if customers were asked for a mob number during reg. Router Config - KPI's show were getting more customers becoming active, this is resulting in the usual configuring the router with the username and password, surprisingly these tend to be mostly migrated customers who already have everything set up for the existing provider and don't know how to set up with PlusNet. Customers do seem to know about the @plusdsl.net but occasionally making a mistake such as .plusdsl.net @plus.net @plusnet.com Faults - The usual fault diagnostics been tested and the customer returning to either raise a fault or update a fault after retesting with a text message, nothing major but its as bad as normal Sales Calls - the main reason for this seems to be "a friend recommended me" which is a great sign for referrals at the moment Noticing customers come through on tech and waiting in the long queue because they actually want more technical sales advice rather than the usual customer service sales queries. Might be worth an IVR option for technical sales query and get them straight through to tech, not to bad today but can be a bit of a wait at peak periods. Mail Setup - Numbers of customers getting new computers and needing help in setting up the mail clients seems to be popular. MySQL Activations - I know this is a 6th but could do with looking into. Customers with cgi/mysql not getting details through when activating the services, mainly on tickets and occasional calls. Not getting many contacts regarding this due to the number of users but certainly an issue seems to have occurred. Finance has been very busy yet again, says Jennifer from, surprisingly enough, Finance. 23 tickets have been closed by the department up to 4pm today leaving no outstanding queries/questions overnight. The team have been busy keeping Direct Debit and credit card payment processing up to date, despite being three people down of because of the holiday season. Networks, proudly presented by Patryck. There was a SUN engineer onsite replacing some bits and bytes in our servers and storage equipment. We are in the middle of upgrading our direct connection ( in technical jargon called peering ) with BBC in London. Apart from that we had quite a busy day - rich in day to day operational stuff. I threatened to write this EOD in Polish but I will save it for next time. Marketing and our doughnut obsessed Mark have said: It's been too early in the week for doughnuts but we have managed to meet the chocolate o'clock deadline. Today we have been beavering away on a new referrals email, doing some work around future products and Tero has been doing some forecasting on our Marketing budget forecasts and reporting. From Products, Ian back from his escapades in Amsterdam, had this to say: In Products we've had a day of reviews and planning. It's nearing the end of the quarter, and in a role like this it's easy to get de-focussed, so making sure we are on course to hit all our objectives is important. In the world of Broadband traffic, we've seen our network return to non school holiday traffic levels, and last night saw some latency on web browsing. We will working to avoid tonight, although it's MS Patch Tuesday so demand could be high again. The commercial guys have also been looking at the BT cessation charge today, and at our migration policy now BT have extended their free migration special offer by six months. Development's own Michal has given his own tuppence on his days work: Here at PlusNet, we constantly work on improving our Customers' experience and today I was making final touches to a project - codenamed Home Phone Revamp - which falls fully into this category. As a part of the project, we removed limit on calls to local landline numbers for Customers using the Anytime+ Home Phone service, thus allowing them to make as many calls as they wish for free. To make it even better, we removed the £20 cancellation charge on Home Phone service - not that anybody would want to cancel it, anyway - especially now! But our work here very often can't be seen directly by PlusNet Customers, as it is important work on "behind the scene" tools, allowing PlusNet employees to work even quicker and more efficiently. And this is this case here also - the Home Phone Revamp project improved tools used by CSC agents to work on Customers' requests regarding their Home Phone Service, adding new possibilities to them and enhancing existing ones. Even more work can be done now by just several clicks, minimalising time taken to fulfill the request, be it a Ticket send to PlusNet or a phone call. Comms has landed... from Bob Howdy! it's my first foray into the world of EOD's so go easy on me! 
Today I've been downstairs in ye olde training room enlightening some of our n00bs in the art of DNS, domains and our infamous Domain Control System! Bit of a nostalgic trip for me as I used to be resident CSC trainer in days gone by, made a nice change though even though my backlog of work has increased a little as a result! Chris has been up with Networks this PM and along with Mand has been enjoying his first taster of the change control process that Comms are now part of. Matt has been working on a blog post detailing his experience of the CSC to Comms transition following his secondment, and been putting some of the final touches to his latest piece on the fabled Cornerstones. James has been holding the fort across the forums although it must be said he didn't look overly grateful after volunteering to represent Comms in an up and coming project only to be landed with a 36 page project spec courtesy of Mand! He's also been (obviously) looking forward to demonstrating some editorial prowess in todays EOD. We've been discussing the recent sporadic email delays with our Net Ops guys at length today and Mand has summarised some of the changes we'll be making over the next week or so in the blog post here. Well that's pretty much it from me. Have a nice evening all! It's been emotional. James
End of Day: September 11th