Support Pages update

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Hi. I’m going to jump right in to give you an update on what’s been happening with the Support Pages lately. A quick intro is in order first I guess.. My name is Pete Jackson and I’m Support Content Manager. I’ve been at PlusNet for quite a long time, holding quite a few positions, but all that history stuff is something for another day. For those not familiar with my current role (and I’m guessing that would be most of you) here’s a very quick summary. I manage a small team of content developers who maintain the support materials on the website: technical support pages, the help assistant, automated emails and ticket text and so on. We describe what we look after as ‘in-life’ content; ie. all the reference material that you’d look to on the website, or have pushed to you, to find help and assistance. I’m hoping that by my maintaining this blog it will give some insight into how we approach what is, when you stop to think about it, quite a large body of work. Today for example, as well as publishing a new set of network performance graphs (more about these later), I’ve been looking at ‘smiley face’ feedback for the support pages. This is something I do regularly to work out which pages are receiving the most positive, and which the most negative, ratings. Pages that we have just written or edited we’d obviously like to see being of use and getting good ratings. Conversely, we look at pages that are rated poorly as needing attention. Our three-category ‘happy, middling, sad’ seems to work well for us to identify whether the page is doing its job (we’d see it as corresponding to good, medium and poor). We assume then, that for a page to receive ‘sad face’ ratings, it hasn’t met expectations, or is an indicator that the reader has been unable to find the information sought after. By ranking pages according to customer ratings we can RAG them (Red, Amber, Green) and focus our attention on Red and Amber. We did this in a concentrated focus during December and January and saw the number of sad face ratings fall steadily. When I started this role last August, we had consistent ‘sad’ ratings at over 60% and we’ve brought this down to approx 35%, with positive ratings rising from 25% to a high of 45%+ during Dec/Jan. We have, however, seen our positives fall back to around 35% since mid-February. Our initial thoughts are to why this is happening are two-fold. Firstly, since mid-Feb my team have been focussing primarily on problem fixes and project work; PlusNet’s launched quite a lot of new development work (not least Broadband Your Way) over the past few weeks. So we've been very busy Content Developers.  And secondly, we’re taking a lot of new signups; so we’ve got a lot of new customers trying to find out why their broadband speeds might not be actually 8Mbps, how to set up their mailboxes for the first time or deal with spam. There’s plenty of work I need to do to better understand what expectations are being set, especially with our newest customers. (If you’re a new customer please do let me know if you think we provide enough help right at the beginning, to get you set up and running). I also use the ratings and feedback to work out a Top 30 useful pages. (I’m hoping to get an update out to this real soon.. with a contrasting ‘hall of shame’ for the most poorly rated pages). One of the reasons for publishing this page was to provide quick access to the pages that lots of people have found to be helpful. As part of our recent focus on making the Support section easier to navigate, this exercise has highlighted that some of the work I did last year (Broadband Max guides, correct use of microfilters etc) is still central to our technical support issues. However, appearing in this ‘Top 30’ now are some of our newest Apple Mac and MS Vista support materials, and the network ‘blueprint’ documents which were published alongside Broadband Your Way. I’ll go into more detail about what the main feedback points are with our Support pages (both positive and negative) over the coming weeks, but for now I’ll leave you with a link to those new graphs I mentioned. They show recorded ‘sessions’ for our mailcore, mail relays and I’ve set up some for the homepage servers too. I hope you find them of interest: Mail sessions: http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/mail_sessions.shtml Homepage server sessions: http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/webspace_servers.shtml