Ticket system is a complete waste of time.

[#1]

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If a system like that were to be implemented it would be largely abused and entirely removing the point of having it in the first place.

I would agree that it would be abused if there was an ESCALATE button on the ticketing page from the start, but that is not what I am saying.
Both my solutions put in an enforced delay -
The ping-pong needs to go back and forth say five times each way before escalating - which you appear to agree is desirable.
The long answer time does the same, my suggestion waits 48 hours before notifying the customer that they have not been forgotten, then ANOTHER 24 hours before allowing escalation.  Therefore escalation would only occur after the unanswered ticket has been sitting there 18 times your target 4 hours answering time, so is it unreasonable to escalate an unanswered ticket after nearly 20 time the target ?
You also need to consider, in both these cases, if the escalation point was reached, then if an "ESCALATE" button appeared in the ticket system, many people may not need to escalate and would be happy to wait, but those people with an urgent technical issue (such as no connection), need a more immediate response and would therefore request escalation.  I am also assuming that the ESCALATE feature would only be needed once, as the issue should be resolved quickly as it has become a priority issue.

[#2]

Hi purleigh,

Quote

The ping-pong needs to go back and forth say five times each way before escalating - which you appear to agree is desirable.

I wouldn't say that this was desirable. Ideally we'd like to get the issue resolved on the first touch of the ticket, whoever picks it up - and that's what we're aiming for. The focus at the moment is on one contact resolution, and as James posted above, on getting the response times down to at least 4 hours. If there's anything more urgent than that then calling in would definitely be the best bet.
If people were waiting 24 or 48 hours to have their ticket escalated, just to get the answer they wanted in the first place, I suspect we'd see a lot more posts on here from people not prepared to wait for that.

[#3]

Quote from: Jameseh

Personally I don't agree. ........................................... ..................................... We'll continue recruiting until we get to a point where calls and tickets are being responded to in a timely manner.

As a matter of interest..... Mand, Chris, and others, have responded to my "get more staff to answer phones...." http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,80676.0.html
(well worth a read, if you have missed it)
which was originally posted  on the 7th of November 2009....  Stating that they are recruiting and training more staff.... (repeated answer to many queries)
Can you tell me  (and the rest of the people on the forum) How many new staff have been recruited, trained, and retained, (increasing the number of staff
already available) since 7th November 2009.

[#4]

Sorry Shutter, we don't generally reveal our actual headcount numbers.
It is however, a considerable increase.

[#5]

That answer does not inspire confidence.....
, we must assume that if only 1 person has been recruited, and retained. then that would count as "  a considerable increase   " ............................compared to none at all....

[#6]

Gerry,
It's certainly a much much larger number that 1, as James posted on your other thread on the day he came back he was one of 19 people starting.

[#7]

If you check back on my earlier post:

Quote

I'm currently sat with 16 new members of staff who are going through their "grad bay" fortnight before joining the rest of the team.

[#8]

I just wanted to know, because I have had the same answer several times, and if the number is the same for each answer, then I hate to think how big that "small backlog" of tickets is.......

[#9]

[quote=Jameseh]We're trying to get to a point where all standard tickets are answered within 4 hours (specialist roles like faults might take a bit longer), which will apply to all times of the day and week.  I'm currently sat with 16 new members of staff who are going through their "grad bay" fortnight before joining the rest of the team.
We'll continue recruiting until we get to a point where calls and tickets are being responded to in a timely manner.
So does that mean that the service will just be more of the same mediocre support - but slightly quicker ?.  It seems to me that instead of recruiting extra customer support staff to respond to customer problems, that PlusNet should instead be recruiting more technical staff to provide more reliable services !  - and hence reduce customer problems by product excellence rather than have an army of support staff mopping up a large pool of ongoing unresolved issues.

[#10]

We are.
We're recruiting a mix of customer service and technical support staff, to answer both account enquiries and to handle those of a more technical nature.
It isn't just a case of extra bodies to pick up the phone, but to expand our Sheffield based call centre to supply a quality level of service.

[#11]

If we all were to post ticket numbers and dates going back a couple of years it should be possible for us to work out pretty accurately how many tickets are raised per month and see the trend. Perhaps someone might like to have a go at this (perhaps with a graph). Here's a selection from my account:
24627635 01/04/2008
25616420 11/07/2008
26358808 18/09/2008
26586429 08/10/2008
26872158 03/11/2008
27054323 20/11/2008
27216550 06/12/2008
27275489 12/12/2008
27446793 04/01/2009
27873750 14/02/2009
27950264 23/02/2009
28066740 05/03/2009
28352597 30/03/2009
28617513 26/04/2009
28777731 13/05/2009
28954060 31/05/2009
29073140 11/06/2009
29225792 29/06/2009
29391504 16/07/2009
29486977 26/07/2009
29790975 25/08/2009
30005984 15/09/2009
30809707 17/11/2009
31176042 12/12/2009
31839600 01/02/2010
32613796 22/02/2010
Edit: April 2009 to April 2010 looks like a roughly 25% increase in the number of tickets compared to the previous year. Has the number of support and technical staff gone up by a similar amount?

[#12]

I don't think using data just from your account gives an accurate representation of the changes between the number of tickets raised. It's worth noting that as well as recruiting more staff (I've just come out of another assessment day) there have been efficiency improvements to a number of processes which used to create a large number of tickets into the CSC so cutting down these automated tickets has had the same effect as some recruitment.

[#13]

So because of the efficiency improvements to a number of processes which used to create a large number of tickets into the CSC (which were artificially inflating the numbers); in fact there's been a larger than 25% increase in the number of tickets raised by users!

[#14]

Being perfectly honest Jelv, I couldn't tell you the %age increase in tickets over the last 12 months.

[#15]

I'm not sure whether simply counting ticket numbers would actually reveal anything, because it does not take into account how long each issue took to be resolved, and does not consider whether the ticket was answered satisfactorily the first time or whether it took months of ping-pong before the customer gave up (or the ticket was closed without resolution) !.
jim:quote