There's been talk in the forums today about our plans for the Customer Support Centre. As you know, we have a call centre based in Durban, South Africa, in addition to our one here in Sheffield. This is where we provide customer support for Madasafish, as well as for ISPs for the John Lewis Partnership. I've provided more background in the blog below but here in summary are the key points:
- Plusnet is growing as a business and we intend to continue to provide the quality of support and continued levels of customer satisfaction we are known for
- Our colleagues in South Africa have great knowledge and experience in certain areas, winning several customer service awards in the last couple of years
- It doesn't make sense for us not to look at ways in which we can work together, to improve quality and customer satisfaction
- Any changes we will be making will be made one step at time
- We're still hiring into the Sheffield CSC http://www.plus.net/careers/
More detail read on. If you have any questions please check out the forum.. Last year Madasafish became part of the Plusnet family. Since Brightview was bought by BT in early 2007 we've been busy moving their customers over into our Plusnet 'Workplace'. In all, during the last 12 months, we've migrated more than 70,000 Madasafish, Waitrose and Greenbee customers over from the Brightview systems and network onto ours. As part of this we've gained a customer support centre in Durban, South Africa, which we have been responsible for since last September. English is of course very well spoken in Durban and they're only an hour or two ahead of Sheffield which makes it really easy to work together. Nick Dodds, our Operations Manager, has been keeping us all up to date with the news from Durban in his blogs (Nick's first blog). The team in South Africa have won numerous awards for service over the years, which is why the John Lewis Partnership chose Brightview to provide Internet services for their own customers. We also talked about our new CSC in South Africa at our last Customer Open Day and highlighted there how importantly we view the quality of our customer support. Up to now our South Africa team has worked exclusively with the Madasafish and John Lewis Partnership brands. But we've been working towards the point where, instead of Plusnet's Support Centre in Sheffield getting larger and larger, we could use the South African team to allow us to continue to grow as a business. Since we completed the integration of Brightview, key Plusnet staff have spent a lot of time over in Durban. We've got a much better understanding of the Waitrose, Greenbee and Madasafish customers and we've built up strong relationships with our colleagues in South Africa. In fact for the past 12 months many of the CSC staff from Sheffield have been visiting in teams, spending up to 6 weeks at a time with the employees there. As well, as part of this, CSC management from Durban have spent time here in Sheffield. There's been a lot of focus on training how we do things the Plusnet way; particularly in using our ‘Workplace' systems and in how we communicate as a business. We have daily conference calls and constant instant messenger chat to build the team across our two sites. We're now supporting well over 300,000 customers on Plusnet, Madasafish, John Lewis Partnership and BT brands. Sheffield needs some help to get through all the work - due to the growth in customer numbers on our Plusnet brands, call and ticket volumes have increased into Sheffield. This is affecting our call answer rate and ticket turn around. As this growth continues we are planning to maintain the service and quality levels by utilising our colleagues' knowledge and experience in South Africa. The South Africa team have now got a good handle on Workplace and efficiencies are improving. We're looking at how we can move some customer service ‘workflows' (such as failed billing) between the teams as capacity becomes available. We aim to handle higher volumes of tickets and calls without compromising on quality. We're confident that by utilising the specialist teams we have at our two locations, we can improve efficiencies whilst allowing business growth, and most importantly for us, build on our reputation for excellent customer service. We're really excited about our new Partner Programme which we'll be launching soon and on the back of this it's likely that we'll need to increase the size of the business support teams in Sheffield. Any changes in how we work will be taken one step at a time over the next year. We'll make sure the right teams with the right skills in the right location deliver the right level of service. And we'll also always keep a core team for every stream of work here in Sheffield. One of the key reasons customers choose Plusnet is the high quality of our of customer support. And we aren't going to break that - ever. Because if ever we do, we know we're no longer Plusnet and we'd just become another boring telecoms provider. Throughout all of these changes we'll keep you updated with our regular blogs and newsletters. We'll continue to publish our Customer Satisfaction results, the latest of which is due in the next couple of days. Carol Axe Customer Services Director