Reduction Of Average Ticket Response Times

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Here at Plusnet we are always looking forward into how we are able to improve.  Here in the Customer Support Centre we aim to improve on the successful period that we are having at the current time. I’m sure those of you who have used this community site before are well aware that 2008 has been a successful year for our customer support department, winning no less than 9 out of 11 categories in the USwitch awards. More information on the awards can be found here: http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/03/18/plusnet-cleans-up-at-uswitch-awards/ And here: http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/03/14/breaking-news-plusnet-win-best-consumer-isp-at-ispa-awards... As an ambitious company we are always pushing ourselves to build on this achievement, and we feel we can better serve our customer’s needs by reducing the first response time on Help Assistant tickets from 8 hours to just 4 hours. We currently have many help assistant tickets pools for many different aspects of Internet support.  This varies from Broadband and phone setup, service faults, networks and general Technical Support and Customer Services. For the generic Customer service and technical assistance pools we aim to have an average first response to these tickets within 4 hours.  As faults and provisioning can depend on action required from a 3rd party such as BT wholesale, we are unable to offer this SLA for these pools, however we do endeavour to provide updates on these tickets every 24 hours, or set expectations on when the next update will be available. The main reason that we have made this change is to increase satisfaction amongst our customers. The Help Assistant The Portal that our customers use is a major factor in the way Plusnet is run as a business.  Our business model right from the outset of the company has been based around a ‘self serve’ ethos where we offer support whilst trying to educate our customers.  On the portal itself there are hundreds of help and support web pages which offer advice from setting up an email client to building Websites. Most common questions that we get asked by customers can be found on the support pages – and if your question isn’t there, please let us know and we will try to add it! The Help Assistant will soon start to see some changes made to it - nothing drastic at first!  Don't expect to see this changing overnight - we are looking to improve ease of use and help our people find what they are looking for, without breaking something that works pretty well for us and our customers. To help us know exactly what you think of our online support we do offer a number of features which let you express your opinions.  On the bottom of each support page there is ‘Rate This Page’ which lets you pick one of three faces (one happy, one undecided, and one unhappy), this allows customers to leave feedback, if you found the support page helpful or not, it also helps us to understand the pages we need to focus on as a priority. When your issue has been resolved using the ticket system, you are able to close this on the portal.  When closing a ticket you also get an option to give us feedback on the response that we have given you in the question.  Again you can select a smiley face and leave a comment. We do check these reports everyday to see why people are unhappy with responses and this allows us to address each one accordingly. See the blog we did on this: http://community.plus.net/blog/2007/06/15/quality-of-customer-support/ SMS When a customer raises a ticket we now have the option to be able to reply the ticket but also send a text message.  This is a great feature both for the customer and ourselves.  When a customer has raised a fault and we require a retest or an update, this allows us to text the customer with this information, this is especially useful when the customer has a connection issue, or does not have access to the internet.  The customer is also able to respond to the text message if they wish rather than using the help assistant, this can save time for the customer and therefore get a quicker turnaround to getting issues resolved.  All these contacts are still logged on the customers account and can be viewed by both the customer and us. The customer has the option to opt in for this service. Ticket Pools Pools are a collection of tickets that are raised internally (by agent or script) or by customers online.   The Help assistant groups them together where they have common themes or require a specific team or skill to work through them. Although the help assistant generally places a query into the correct pool, if a customer chooses the wrong path, or asks to raise a ticket at the start of the process they sometimes go to the wrong pool. When this happens we transfer these to the correct pool so we can allocate appropriate resource and expertise to deal with the particular questions. The two main ticket pools are Customer Support Centre (technical) and Customer Services.  It is these two pools that we are aiming for a 4 hour first touch. On occasions if a more technical or complicated issue is raised to the generic CSC or CS pools it may get moved to a more specialised ticket pool for specialised agents to deal with.  We do understand that this may take longer however it’s important that the agents with the correct skills deal with certain issues to ensure a quality response and wherever possible we can offer a first time fix. I do hope that this explains how our ticket pools work and gives you all a slightly better understanding of how we are looking to improve the service we offer. Thanks for reading, any and all feedback is very welcome. If you wish to see the results of the last customer satisfaction survey, please go to the following link: http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/07/09/customer-satisfaction-results-from-june-2008/