EOW - 7th August 2009
Hello readers!
Welcome to our first End of Week post.
For those who didn't see the blog I posted the other day, we've decided to move to a weekly format. We think it'll make things a bit more interesting for you, rather than spreading things out thinly every day. There's not much room for me to say much else as there's loads of entries!
Better get started then, here's Pete from the CSC.
Afternoon Everyone,
There's not a great deal to report this week apart from easy setup which launched yesterday. It sounds so much better than "TR69" and I am sure many of you hate jargon just as much as I do. I have to admit though that once you learn how it all works its pretty darn cool and I want one! I can't have one because I wouldn't have anything to set it up on. On a more serious note, easy setup is great in so many ways.It will enable you to get on line faster and we will be able to spend more time delivering our award winning support. We have had new members of the team join us this week on technical and Customer service. It's always nice to see new people and as I am not very good at making tea I can avoid it as much as possible. No luck with the dish washing though. I hear you say "Dish washing in a call centre!?" Yes, we have a kitchen in the CSC. We are all eagerly awaiting the results of our football competition. The management have been very generous in giving us cake (Which I am personally not complaining about) However I hope we get the results soon as the football balloons just have to go.. The amount of calls and tickets coming in to the CSC have been high however We are all pulling together to ensure that we respond as quickly as possible. The highest amount of calls this week have been about faults and fault updates. Our faults team , who will also be posting within this "EOW" as always do a cracking job in getting these sorted. I've actually run out of things to say... which Is rare for me I am told. So thanks for reading
Over to the other side of the floor and it's Adam from the BSC
It's Adam with a quick firing update from our Business Support. Jake has joined us this week on a secondment to build his knowledge up on all things Business related along with assisting us with calls. Oli and myself have been firing through all our faults, as well as clearing up some mail related tickets sent by our Network buds. Phil is taking it one step at a time (not quite sure what that means though) but has been mainly been dealing with calls today Vicky from Customer Services has been assisting us all week with our various Customer Services, Billing and Provisioning tickets. Everybody else has been answering all the calls and dealing with normal Technical tickets. See ya next week....
Moving downstairs (tiring this is), here's Jay from the COT & Sales area...
A big hello from cot n sales !!! > Well what a traumatic week in the life of Plusnet !! No Darren or Davina due to being poorly - so its been a quieter week than normal - we all hope you get better soon Due to farmers restrictions and the vets indignation of 'piggy flu' the lower floor has been sparse to say the least. I am happy to say that the remaining stalwarts in retentions and sales have pulled out all the stops, so that the cogs run smoothly even though the tyres were severely depleted. A massive congratulations to Heather who has stepped into the spotlight to cover both managers jobs and didn't she do well !! A welcome goes out to our new advisors who have taken things in their stride Its been a busy week - but one which has seen excellent teamwork and no long faces ha ha !!!
Back over to where we started on the CSC floor, Adheel brings us the Faults Team update...
Hello readers, and welcome to the first offering from Faults for the End of Week! (wow that sounds weird!) As always it's been a busy week in faults with a few members of staff off on holiday and one or two catching some kind of flu/cold related illness, they're all back to full fitness now though! The rest of the team has had to step up and be counted (as they have done admirably!) We have three new secondee's on the team for this month, Alex, Kev and Lee. All three move across from technical shift teams to broaden their faults knowledge and gain some further training and experience. In my best Blind Date voice here is a bit of information about the three: NOTE: If you don't remember Blind Date your far too young or I'm getting on! Alex has worked at Plusnet from almost two years and enjoys playing the piano and BMX'ing. He also enjoys candelit dinners and moonlight strolls along the beach. Lee enjoys drunken shenanigans (as seen by his Facebook pictures the naughty boy) and has been at Plusnet for around 1 year. He supports Bolton Wanderers and mistakenly believes they will challenge for the Premiership this year. Kev is our office Trekkie and likes wearing loud floral shirts to the office even on rainy days. He is also known for his WoW expertise as well as being one of the funniest guys in Plusnet. Our regular team members Brad and Keith have been having a well deserved week off, with Brad going back down 'sarf, and Keith... well, we have no idea where Keith is! We hope he is having a good time on a cruise ship or in the Bahama's (or even if he is just in Sheffield.) The rest of the team has dealt with the usual variation of Home Phone and Broadband related faults this week. To keep the roles varied, myself, Richard and Tony have all done some Home Phone faults this week along with Broadband issues interspersed. Alex has been ploughing through speed faults and Lee has been dealing with new faults raised online or coming through the support centre to get himself up to speed with how faults are dealt with after the initial point of contact. The other secondee's along with Tom and Munky have been dealing mainly with faults already raised with our supplier. That's about it from the team! I'm looking forward to the end of my shift today, so I can see the Super Duper Blades beat the lads from Middlesbrough in the 1st Championship game of the year. Simon our team leader and speed guru Alex have been winding up Tony about tomorrow Wednesday vs Barnsley match, and although I don't like either team, I'm hoping for a draw, otherwise next week is going to a long week of winding up and banter! Have a good weekend all!
The Business Improvements team sit with the CSC, so I can pause for breath for a few minutes while Ali comprehensively takes us through what they've been up to...
Hello from the Business Improvement (BI) team, which is based in the CSC. The department's still very new, so we're still finding our feet to a certain extent. I've been in my role for about 3 weeks now and it's already been eye opening to work in a whole new area. I'll give you a quick update on what I am looking at and I've also got some updates from other people in the BI team. My first major remit is to look at our phone system, which you, our customers, call in on. The phone system needs a refresh and my task is to work out what that refresh should sound like and behave like. I want to add in some new features, to make things smoother for you and to make the system more intuitive. I'm also looking at a number of features that would enable you to self-serve, which would be handy if the lines are quite busy - as it will save you having to wait. Do not worry either - we are not getting rid of any customer service agents - this is all about making the system better for everyone. I am very passionate about the 'customer exprience' so I won't be just throwing lots of automated features at it and hoping for the best. I've collated together a huge number of new ideas on how we could improve on what we have - so it's onto the next phase of working out what is cost effective to develop and what adds value, both for us and our customers. I'll be including some usability studies into the project too, so that I can prove people will like and prefer the new system (and if they don't - we'll tweak it until people agree it's a change for the better!). I am also looking at 'one contact resolution' as part of this - so that we try our very best to deal with and/or fix issues the first time you raise a ticket or call in. Clearly, the more we can fix stuff first time round the better for you and the more efficient it will make us internally. Meanwhile Luke has been looking at the Ticketing side of 'one contact resolution', which will tie into the phone side of things that I've got. He's also been working on Active Discounts and has put together a presentation on this. Because Luke manages the relationship with some of our suppliers, he also fitted in some trilateral calls and is working on something for BT - the Challenge Cup. This is a special challenge BT put out to customer-focused teams, so Luke's championing his team - come on The SIM-sons!!! (Nick has a little more info later on - so you can find out why it's called The SIM-sons!!) Elsewhere, James is looking at some huge improvements to our provisioning process (i.e. the ordering process for new lines / broadband / home phone) to reduce bottlenecks. This week he's concentrated on broadband quick wins and what we can fit into the upcoming 'ADSL2+ Project' that will eventually see us offering faster broadband. He's also almost completed the specification for a new 'provisioning dashboard' that will give CSC manages James has also been looking at improvements to the house move process - because the last thing anyone needs is an extra hassle when moving house - so we're going to make some improvements to the process and James or I should be able to share more of that in the next couple of weeks. Finally and no means leastly (is that a word??!). Oh. I mean last but not least. It must be the heat... Nick has been up to his eyes in all sorts of CSC business: This week has been full of recruitment - both for team managers (congrats to Mick and Annette who were successful) and for agents (7 new starters to bolster the teams next week). Aside from that all the usual day-to-day activity and overseeing the operation - it's been a tough old time with high sickness attributed to this swine flu thing you might have heard mentioned in the press? In addition, a team of us have entered the 'BT Challenger Cup' which is a competition for teams across all divisions of the BT Group focusing on business improvement and customer satisfaction. We identified that the SIM order process (moving phone and broadband at the same time) was slow, resource intensive and frustrating for customers, so have set ourselves the goal of improving it, whilst having the chance to present to the Bigwigs in Berlin as a nice side effect. Wish us luck! That's all from BI - see you next week! Ali.
Comprehensive indeed... beat that Chris from Comms...
Over here in the wonderful land of Comms, we've been wondering do tortoises really love sausages on sticks? And would webuyanycar.com really buy any car? In other news, Andy has been seen making a rare appearance in the forums and helping you out with your questions. He's updated some support pages and worked on PowerPoint until his eyes started to bleed. Bob was far too busy to tell me what he'd been up to this week, so once again I'll have to guess. I've got a feeling he was poking around on Twitter, until it went down that is. He's been in quite a few meetings and keeping us up to date with the many projects he's involved in. Matt's been helping out other departments this week, showing his generous side by being the company receptionist for a few days this week. Aside from that he's been in the forums and helped out with some project work. I've been happy as we've now launched our easier to setup hardware, this should help reduce the number of router setup calls coming into the CSC and ensure that we can answer your other queries faster. I've also been going through the forums and replying to some threads. Mand has only been working for 2 days this week as she took Monday-Wednesday off. She's working from home so I'll not disturb her to ask what she's done as I can tell you anyway. She's been working through some home phone related items and cleaning up her task list. For those who haven't seen yet, we've also launched some new business broadband products. Have a good weekend and we'll see you on Monday.
It feels like my eyes did actually bleed at one point too... I was working on the other Plusnet entry for the Challenge Cup that Ali and Nick have mentioned. Ours is about the use of jargon in the workplace and the problems it can cause. Hopefully team "You say TOMATO" will be joining the SIM-sons in Berlin - achtung! We're nowhere near done yet... Tommo's moved up to the networks floor so here he is with their update:
Happy first end of week from the networks floor~! Feels strange contributing a submission for the end of week on a Friday rather than editing the Friday end of day, but still means I can probably go home a few minutes early. So what have we got to tell you? There's lots of big projects going on here's a quick snapshot of what we've done this week: Datacentre Move: - the main focus of the system dev team has been the build out and migration of services to our new primary datacentre. A lot of the build out work is finished, so what happens now is network and server work. We're currently at the prep and testing stage for many of our services but as the weeks follow some of the 'bigger' services will be moved and you'll see maintenance announcements on the portal. CBC Update: - we are also working on internal upgrades to the systems that process your data usage, this work is done to ensure we can scale as our userbase grows. Easy Setup Routers: - we have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to fine tune the systems that provide the ESR service, with the project now live we can see customers starting to benefit from being able to setup their routers much easier. In other news we today placed the order to move our third customer on to the FTTC trial. Our first two are live and online and getting over 20Mbps speeds, the third will join shortly and I'll be contacting some of the others who have expressed interest in the trial over the next few days to arrange for them to take part as well. Have a great weekend and catch you all again next time...
And finally *whew!* here's Chris from Marketing. With all the weather and the Business launch, I reckon these guys will have been super busy...
Marketing EOW: Afternoon all, This week we have mostly been writing some words and drawing some pictures. The end.
Thought so! 
Well thats the first End of Week done, seems to have gone alright... Thanks to all the contributors and to you for reading, see you next time!