Hi I've touched on this subject in other posts recently and in more detail.
1. Reinstate and enhance the ticketing system for non-telephone communication, make it much easier for customers to find on the website, and link its functionality to the chat and voice call processes. Of course customer services staff need to monitor Twitter, Facebook, community forum AND phone lines AND chat because different customers use different systems but this represents a massive inefficiency, it increases privacy risks, it allows issues to fall off the radar, and creates utterly unnecessary duplication. So there should be a preferred method of logging a technical support ticket electronically on a system internal to Plusnet.
2. Develop a mobile app which combines chat, ticketing and voice calling (like my bank's app does). Because if you've got a line fault, the easiest way to get in touch with PN is by mobile phone and if the information has to be written up in a ticket anyway, why not let me, the customer, provide all that information up front.
3. Work with BT Openreach and other ISPs to come up with a far more sensible way of allocating engineer time - I've lost count of the number of times different Openreach engineers have turned up to the same street cabinet at different times on the same day to investigate related issues on behalf of different customers - why not send one engineer out to one cabinet to investigate all pending issues affecting that cabinet?
3. The telephone and chat features need to be far more coordinated with other internal systems and departments, especially when dealing with customers who're phoning up. If that means replacing disparate systems with joined up ones, do it.
This morning I was on hold for 32 minutes, went through security checks, was put on hold again for nine minutes while the call operator looked at the account system, the ticketing system, and talked to the order team... then I was on hold for another seven minutes while the call operator talked to the audit team.
If the PN call handling system routinely has this issue then perhaps some enterprising software developer at PN Towers can come up with a creative way of using those minutes customers spend in the queue to find all the information that the CS engineer might need to refer to once they take the call.
Assuming that were possible and even if doing it only halved the time people spent on hold after their call went through, based on the time I spent on hold I can easily see a team of ten people manning the phones gain 20 more hours in a week to field more calls.
Just a thought.
), I can just imagine a queue of engineers waiting at the cabinet for their turn 'in the box' 