Fault Handling Survey: October 2007

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As part of our commitment to improve the customer experience, we review our internal and customer facing processes, and adapt them based on changes in the products, external processes and customer feedback. As part of the review, we survey customers at the conclusion of their fault, looking at the key parts of the process, utilizing the result as a key indicator of our progress. Each month we then look into the results, and make any changes to the nature of the survey questions, and every quarter we then look over the quarters results and use this information we have gained to further improve our fault logging process to benefit the customer. We have recently completed this quarters review of the results and I would like to share with you key results from this quarter compared to last quarters results, and also touch on a change we are trialling to our faults process to improve the overall customer experience. First of all, if we look at the previous quarters results we have the following key figures from the surveys that were completed. Of the customers who completed the survey after their fault was resolved:- 39% Were not aware that we can offer an SMS text update to their fault. 32% Were not aware of the 0808 free dial-up connection we offer as a backup when a fault is raised. 65% Rated the experience as above average. 44% Were extremely, or very satisfied with the experience. 30% Felt that we did not understand their problem very well. This compares to this quarters results as follows. Of the customers who completed the survey after their fault was resolved:- 36% Were not aware that we can offer an SMS text update to their fault. 27% Were not aware of the 0808 free dial-up connection we offer as a backup when a fault is raised. 70% Rated the experience as above average. 47% Were extremely, or very satisfied with the experience. 25% Felt that we did not understand their problem very well. From this we can see that more of our customers are being made aware of the SMS update facility and the 0808 free dial-up backup connection. Also that more of our customers are happy with the way their fault was handled, with almost half of all the customers surveyed advising they were extremely or very satisfied with how we dealt with the fault. There was also a drop in the amount of customers who felt that we did not understand the problem very well, but this is still too high as we want our customers to feel that if they have a problem with their service they can contact us and we will know what the problem is and how to get it resolved. Two key points of this quarters results also is that the amount of completed surveys was 50% larger than the prior quarters, and that 53% of the faults raised were done so by our customers themselves through our website. Now this is the main scoring that we have gained from the survey, but how can we use this to improve the fault experience for our customers so that it is as quick and painless as possible? Well, some of the questions we ask on the survey are open ended and allow you to give your own personal feedback on what happened with your fault and how it could have been improved and a common theme we are seeing is that when you have a fault, although the information and updates are good, most people would just prefer a callback to let them know what is happening. This is something we have been looking into, to try and arrange a way that we can ensure that whenever anyone has a fault with their connection we continue to treat it as a priority issue, as we always have done, but also look to make sure that our customers are called with every single update. This would then leave our customers feeling more secure in the knowledge that the issue is being dealt with and that they will be called as soon as we have anything, effectively letting us worry about getting it all sorted out for them so that they don't have to call or update us repeatedly. We are currently looking to trial this system shortly with some specific fault types, and will then look into if this is something that will significantly improve the customer experience with faults. If not, then we will continue to look into ways to improve this very important part of our service, and will continue to survey our customers and look to what they are wanting from us when they have a problem with their service.