Logged Faults Process Update

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In March we revised the way that we deal with BT/Tiscali logged faults we trialed a new process to see if we could improve on our response times to improve customer satisfaction and reduce repeat faults with our suppliers. With the guidance of the Tony Thompson and Keith Hiles we devised a solution so share the various Logged Faults workloads and ensure priortisation for the most important at the relevant times of day.

This involved alot of process documentation to be written to ensure that the workflow could be picked up by more members of the support team, a plan was devised to how logged faults from the perspective of all teams should be worked and prioritised on a daily basis, introducing the escalation proceedure to those involved and how to use this to its desired effect and providing more training to analysts within this role to better understand how to deal with these issues going forward.

We have also implemented a faults customer survey to ask you our customers feedback on how YOU feel that the fault was handled both from our persepctive and BT's/Tiscali's. We will be shortly reviewing the responses we have had so far and reviewing to see if we can further improve our processes.

Since we rolled these changes we have seen much improvement :

Our fault repeat rate has dropped from around 21% in March to around 15% at this moment in time (we are looking to get this improved further by escalating with our suppliers as currently if a PSTN fault is found on the line then the fault is immediately closed and looking into ways to prevent this in the future which should see our repeat rate drop even further.) And to add the this week out figures are the lowest they have ever been at just under 11% which shows our continued dedication to improving our faults service.

Average ticket closure times on fault tickets has dropped dramatically from approx 140 hours to the current average of around 50 hours: more than a 50% reduction over 3 months.

Open fault tickets has also dropped with the implementation of specific fault types pools. On average 3 months ago the pools typically held between 250-300 open fault tickets and now the norm is around the 100-150 mark.

Looking at the report provided by BT show that we are constantly below industry average fault rate figures (0.09 against 0.1%) and with continued improvement hope to see these getting even better.

In the near future we are hoping to improve knowledge with homephone faults and role training out to the Business team for the end to end fault process and improve the knowledge within the CSC of diagnosing potential faults on this service.

With the implementation of 'Special Fault Investigation' engineer charging, we are also devising a solution on how this should be challenged with BT and hope to have this in place in the near future.

We are also working pro-actively with BT to reduce our actual number of faults that we have to raise to BT by making solutions to quickly fix customer issues that dont require a fault report to be raised in order to improve customer satisfaction and improve 1st time fix rates on certain fault types.

Going forward our aim is to offer our customer base the best customer experience in the broadband sector and continually seeks ways in which to improve on our existing policies and procedures.

Should we continue to provide an excellent fault service to our customer base this will reduce the contacts/calls coming into the Customer Support Centre and help us to to attract more customers through our referrals policy.