End of Week: 2nd October 2009

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Risin' up, back on the street Did my time, took my chances Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet Just a man and his will to survive So many times, it happens too fast You change your passion for glory Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past You must fight just to keep them alive... Oh yes! We've all gone Prizefighter mad here at work today... why?  I'm sure you know by now but in case you don't, Carl 'The Fridge' Baker (one of our CSC managers) is fighting Danny Williams in the Prizefighter tournament on Sky tonight! So without further ado, let's get on with the posts, Here's Barbara with the HR update:

Another busy week in HR. As it’s the beginning of October we’ve completed our KPI’s , and we’ve started the ball rolling on the Q2 Performance Levelling process; we’ve even had our own Q2 1-2-1’s (just in case you thought we didn’t make ourselves do it – we do!). We’ve also been busy with more recruitment activities including interviews and updating Org Charts. Looking forward we’ve been making plans for the ‘Healthy Workplace Week’ and as a complete co-incidence around 12.5% of us took advantage of having an annual flu jab….so no tapping people’s arms trying to hurt them!

Honestly we've all gone Boxing mad, really!  Maybe Rob from CSC will prove me right...

Hi This is Rob From the House Moves Team Another week has flown by and another weekend is upon us in the Sheffield office. We have had a busy week this week. We've had a few people off so we have had to work doubly hard to keep up with the work, but we pulled together and managed really well. I'd like to take this time as well to welcome back our Song of the week - which this week is Chipmunk - Oopsie Daisy. As per request of David, we think the Alice in chains new album Deserves a honourable mention as well. There is a massive occasion tonight that we are all looking forward to. One of our managers is fighting in the Prizefighter Boxing Tournament his name is Carl "The Fridge" Baker and we are all a 100% behind him. COME ON CARL!!!!

There we go, just slipped it in at the end...sneaky! Lets see if James can keep it going through the Comms update...

There's been a few odd things happening over the last week. England won their 3 ODI game in a row (thrashing the useless South African's) before redelivering their usual form against New Zealand and (dare I say it) Australia. One of our colleagues is off to fight in a big Boxing Match on Sky! It's been a pretty busy week for me - I've been keeping my eyes on our forums as well as picking up some various other bits of work, which included mapping out our Help Assistant in Excel (don't try this at home - it's horrible) for our Business Improvement team so that they can easily identify some improvements we can make to it so our customers find it easier to get the information they need when looking to raise a ticket. Bob's basically been himself. Grumpy. Angry. Bald. He's also been doing a lot of work on our ongoing datacentre move and looking after Network Change Controls. I would ask Matt and Mand what they've been upto, but Matt's on a half day and Mand is ill (1, 2, 3 awwwwwww). They've been helping out in the forums and doing various bits of task work when they've been in though. Chris came back to work today (yay!) after a relaxing break. He tells me he's done absolutely nothing with his time off, which is how all holidays should be spent. He's been catching up today and seeing how various projects have been going on. That's it from me today. Don't forget to tune into Prizefighter tonight at 9pm on Sky Sports. Have a nice weekend mo

Nicely done sir!  Right then, last but not least is Ali, from the Business Improvements team.

Here's Ali McG from Business Improvement. OK - I've got a few updates today! First, Luke's on hol today - the lucky beggar had yesterday off, too, so he's enjoying a nice long weekend. But earlier this week he had plenty of supplier conference calls and is in the thick of a big project to research billing and customer services contacts, as these form the biggest areas we have from our customers, whether it’s through tickets raised on the portal or phone calls. Maria, who’s Head of Business Improvement, had a huge workshop on Monday with BT up in Newcastle, to run through where we are with ADSL2+.This exciting technology will, as you may know, eventually deliver much faster broadband speeds than we typically receive today. I’ve just had my staff account switched onto BT’s 21st Century Network, so once it stabilises I’ll let you know if I’m getting more than the 4 meg I’ve been used to. Nick is coming to the end of his trip to our Durban call centre and whilst there he’s been doing all sorts of useful things. He has sent me a nice long list, which includes the quality acceleration plan roll out, call quality meetings, meeting with team leaders and quality managers to cascade the September Plusnet rally, he attended the weekly performance meeting and weekly internal ops meeting. He also spent a full day monitoring customer calls, a half day monitoring ticket responses and meeting with another client of the same call centre to discuss common themes. Oh and as if that was not enough, met with the Board of the call centre for lunch – perhaps to wind down from so many activities!! Just when I thought that was it, Nick sent another Jabber! He’s been meeting to discuss performance incentive ideas, and done prep and planning for the provisioning and fault trainers visiting the Durban operation in the next two months (that’s if our very own Carl Baker doesn’t win his fight tonight!!!). I actually need to lie down now I’ve typed that up. For me, I’ve spent this week on one strategic area and also plenty of smaller things. My main focus has been looking at any quick improvements we can make to our existing phone system (the one that you, our customers call in on) – so have had plenty of emails to write and reply to, working with our suppliers. It looks like something is going to be possible, so next for me is finding out the costs and lead times involved and making sure there’s a business case for making the improvements – all of which will lead to better customer service. With the London Campaign in full swing, I’ve also been listening in to sales calls, to help the team. I’ve been providing feedback on call quality and areas for improvement; I’ve also been noting where we’ve done a good job. My feedback will help the sales guys and will also be useful for new recruits. We’ve also been getting quite a few wrong calls through to the sales guys, so I’ve been working with people to see how we can direct more customers to the right customer support staff, first time, and avoid having to transfer customers about.

Cheers Ali! That's all for this week, I've just got time for one last GOOD LUCK CARL - best wishes from all at Plusnet!