11th February

‎12-02-2009

We've been running a poll during the last couple of weeks about our End of Day posts. I wanted to see how often you read them - or do they even get read at all? What is interesting is that of a sample of just over a hundred here on Community, about 60% either read them 'Now and again' (35%) or 'A few times a week'. Compare that with the same poll on our members' page on http://portal.plus.net and the contrast is striking. Over on the portal website the sample size is much bigger, over 2,500. And the majority of the poll respondents claim not to have heard about it with 82% asking 'What's that then?' What does that tell us? I take from this that we're providing content that you find interesting to dip into fairly regularly. Once you've found it that is. We clearly need to do a better job getting word out about the content on this front page of Community. There's no doubting that the forums lie at the heart of Community and that's the real 'pull'. That and our Dave T's traffic management blogs of course! Over in the forums today Chris@1000_Oaks asked whether we could have an email subscription service for the EODs. It's a nice idea and echoes an old idea I had for the newsletter. I do find it sad that we can't email our newsletters to customers who have 'opted out' of receiving emails from us, either during signup or afterwards. How many customers have we I wonder who would actually enjoy the newsletter and community but don't get our emails and are missing out? I would personally love to see us offer a number of email subscription services for the newsletters, EOD, product news and so on. But I digress somewhat. If you do want to keep up to date with the EOD posts conveniently, I suggested that an RSS reader would be the easiest option. Just subscribe to http://community.plus.net/blog/category/eod/feed/ in your reader and you'll never miss another EOD again. Did you know you can set up an RSS feed for any of our Community categories? Just replace eod in the URL with the category of your choice, for example Carl's fab gaming blogs are well worth the read: http://community.plus.net/blog/category/gaming/feed/ I'm sat at home right now, having left the office earlier today. The early departure has meant I haven't been around to marshal the troops to give me the raw material for a really good end of day. But the football is of course due to start in 30 mins and I'm sure the network traffic will drop and the CSC will be quieter than usual for the next couple of hours or so. Let's see what the CSC has been doing this afternoon shall we? Here's Kevin with a brief update: The CSC has been very busy today as Wednesdays seem to normally be. Lots of activity on calls and the arrival of a large Fish Head in the office (very scary). (Perhaps I'd better explain. Someone had brought the old Madasafish outfit (fish head) down from the Marketing team's floor - don't ask me why I have no idea. I don't think it's in the least bit scary mind- Ed) Lots of the staff are also looking forward to England beating Spain tonight in the 'friendly' game. The issues that have been high in today's support needs are as follows:

Router setup - People buying new routers and requiring the settings.
Fault updates - After we text them or returning our calls.
Email setup - I don't think many users realise how good our help site is in regards to this (what a nice thing to say.. are you after something? - Ed).
Provisioning updates - BT activating lines early (amazing I know, it does happen a lot)
Raising new faults. - The snow is causing problems with ADSL.

I have to go now and hit my target so I can finish off my box of wine when I get home. Thanks Kevin. I'm going to look at what content we should put into our EODs. I know that lately we've been getting one, maybe two good updates for you. Which bits are your favourite? I'm thinking that a service status summary would be a useful feature.. what do you think? Peter