Good afternoon all. With all the beavering we have been doing in the Customer Support Centre (CSC) recently to improve the customer experience, it has been hard to get any reports out to you on different areas that may interest you. With all the awards going around I thought this would be an ideal time to give you some information regarding the volumes of contacts coming into our CSC against the increase in customer numbers. As you would expect the more PlusNet customers that sign up with us, the potential for more contacts to the CSC increases. A contact is a phone call or a ticket from a customer which comes into our Sheffield CSC. How has this affected the support centre I hear you say? Well, not that much actually, due to the increased focus on getting problems resolved first time and offering as much online support as possible. A result of this is that the actual amount of contacts raised per customer has been on the decrease, with the stats showing on the following graph: 
How have we done this? Our CSC is always trying to give the best quality support possible and to try to resolve all issues first time and remove the requirement for anyone to call back ( ISPA and USwitch are good indicators that we are not bad at this :)). We consistently review calls and tickets coming into the support centre to ensure our staff are giving the correct information out at all times. On top of this we are always looking for other areas to improve the customer experience. Recently we have changed the way we look at faults and are now contacting all customers that have a fault logged with us and cannot connect in order to provide updates on what is happening, although this has resulted in more calls out it results in less customers calling for updates on their faults. We are also using SMS to provide short updates where we have a mobile number for the customer. We have recently introduced welcome calls where the analysts are calling customers to ensure everything is ok on activation and therefore reducing the requirement to call in to setup. As a business we try to promote self-service so that customers do not have to wait in any queues or await responses to tickets when they can action the work themselves, and learn about their service by fixing their own issues. We are constantly working to improve the information available online through customer feedback and the smiley faces shown on every page. You may have also noticed various different flash videos showing online to help setup different aspects of our customers service such as routers and spam filters. As part of this review we looked at the confirmation page sent out to customers on signup and the information we were providing. This was changed to provide information that customers were calling in for, and therefore reduced the number of customers calling in for setup details. Finally we are maintaining a very steady network (service status) with everyone looking to stabilise and improve areas that have caused us pain in the past and resulted in customers calling up with problems. We send out customer surveys to our customers to gain feedback and help improve this moving forward. So if you do receive a request to complete one of these from us please do complete it so we can keep improving the service for you. You can find recent results on our blog for Customer Satisfaction and you can ask questions in our forums. This is not the end of this we are always working to improve the way we offer support to make it as easy as possible for our customers to get the information they need or resolve any problems that they have.
Customer contacts into the PlusNet CSC