A Shift in the life of… a Tech Support Analyst.

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Hi, my name is Brad Knights-Toomer and I am one of the Technical Support Analysts here at Plusnet. As we are split into three teams, we work 2 early shifts (7am - 4pm), 2 late shifts (2pm - 11pm) and have 2 days off. This is the typical shift pattern over 6 days and it allows for as many analysts in for the peak periods of the day. I am going to write about a typical early shift on Monday 18th June. 6:30am - This is the time when I get into work. It is slightly early but it does give me time to look through the various events that have been occurring the past two days when I have been off. I also take time to set everything up ready for the day ahead. The rest of the team come in between 6:15am and 7am for a 7am start. 7:00am - We find out what workflow (calls, tickets, faults, other) we are working today, I am doing the Billing pool until 9am and then on calls so should expect to answer around 50 calls today. The Billing pool involves Support Tickets where customers have normally asked for a MAC key but some outstanding payments are due. If the customer has remained with us then there is no need to take this payment but if the customer has left, we have to contact the customer regarding this. Don't worry, we don't contact customers before 9am 🙂 8:00am - Between now and 9:00am, the rest of the business start coming in to work. Everything seems to have gone as normal so far this morning, we have taken quite a few calls which is usual for a Monday morning. 9:30am - Busy as usual, we have entered the peak time for a Monday morning. Calls have been coming in quick but they do not have any similar pattern to them. They are the usual calls, fault raising, email setup, fault updates and failed billing. Unfortunately our Call View screen has gone down so I cannot see how many customers are in the queue but I do expect it to be around 5 - 10. 9:45am - The call queue has shot up to 16 customers. Everyone we have here is busy trying to get this wait time down. Still no pattern to calls emerging. 10:30am - It has been a busy morning so far! 20 calls in queue. Most of the calls today have been either raising faults or faults updates. We are currently looking into ways to improve this area so customers will not need to call for updates as often. 11:45am - It seems to be the peak time of year for house moves as we have had a lot of customers ringing to check the status of their Broadband house move orders. The call queue has gone down as well to 7 customers with a wait time of around 7 minutes. I fully expect this number to jump up as customers start to go on their lunch breaks from work and ring us up. 12:30pm - As predicted, the call queue has shot up again with customers using some of their lunch break to chase up Broadband issues. 1:30pm - The call queue has come right down now, mostly due to more customers being back at work. Also within the next 30 minutes, agents on the next team will start to come in to work. This will mean double the amount of agents answering the phone so there should not be as long a wait in the queue. Currently so far the average wait time is 3 minutes 49 seconds, which is not too bad considering we have taken over 600 calls already. As you can expect, the call centre is bustling with busy agents taking calls, answering tickets, fixing faults, placing orders, retaining customers, and communicating to customers via the forums. 2:10pm - Both teams are in now and answering calls. The call queue has gone down to zero so any customers would be able to get straight through. During 2pm and 4pm, it is the best time to call as we do have double the amount of staff on to take calls. By now, we have taken over 700 calls which is around normal for the first day of the week. As there are no calls in the queue, there is another opportunity to answer customer questions raised in the Help Assistant. There are about 170 Questions in the ticket pool which we will go through. This should be reduced throughout the afternoon and mostly cleared by our Nights Staff. 3:10pm - Into my last hour of the shift. It has gone very quick today due to how busy it has been. So far today, we have taken over 850 calls and the average wait time is down to 3 minutes and 15 seconds. Everyone has been right on key today so things have gone smoothly, which is always a good thing! 4:05pm - The shift is over for me now. It has been very very busy today, myself taking 46 calls between 9am - 4pm and answering over 60 tickets. All in all, the total calls taken so far is just under 1000 which is a nice busy day for everyone! It has been a good day and it feels good to help customers with their Broadband. As my team mates and I get ready to go home and relax, the rest of the business are still plowing on with their work. The average call wait today has been 3 minutes and a couple of seconds, which has decreased throughout. I hope this blog has been insightful and given you an idea of what goes on in a typical shift. Brad