Wednesday 11th March

‎12-03-2009

Good Evening Readers! I'm back to my regular Wednesday night slot hopefully and we've even arranged Ali to come and be the editor tomorrow! March is every busier than a normal month for Plusnet. We are approaching the end of our financial year (2008/09) so people are trying to wrap up projects and objectives for their end of year reviews, finishing budget forecasts and business cases and all the sorts of stuff you have to do in time for a businesses new year. This morning I put the finishing touches on a business case detailing the upgrade for one of our core platforms (the one that handles counting all your bits and bytes!) and this afternoon I did the prep work for the End of Year reviews of two of my team members. What about the rest of Plusnet? Nick from the CSC

Hello! Midweek at the CSC has been hectic as always, giving us all a good work out here. This was made worse at one point this morning when our phone system had a problem forwarding some calls, causing our queues to get a lot longer for a short while. It smarts a bit when things like this happen – there's been a huge effort here by all the teams in the CSC to try and get call wait times down and this sort of problem only causes headache. Still, we're continuing to get loads of people asking about our new products. It was a big decision to go Unlimited so it's good to know it's been embraced so fully. My own account finally switched to Unlimited on Monday so I've been trying it out first hand. The Pro package remains popular too, with none of the usage being traffic managed - ideal for gamers (and seeing as I get to do the CSC End of Day today, I feel it's only fair to get in a shameless plug for a little site that's proved quite popular here amongst the gamers in the customer support centre) We're still having a spot of trouble with emails and account summaries showing the wrong subscription amounts for some customers, but we're getting it sorted. Other than that, I suppose lots of this stuff has been happening:

Sales – It never ends at the moment! Always a good thing, to be honest. There's almost as many old customers as new calling up.

Billing – The inevitable aftermath of a change of products. Still just confirming to people what they will be paying, and answering any questions.

Faults – The usual sort of thing here, nothing too major. No sync faults and authentication seem to be topping the bill, but I've also been able to close a few faults today which is always pretty satisfying. One of them had been going on a while and it's good to finally see it working again. I seem to have got a lot of people with issues browsing some web pages these last few days – it's quite often an easy fix so a lot of the time you can get those sorted over the phone on the first call in.

Router set up – Nice and simple really. Not much to report here!

Provisioning - Lots of you asking for updates no new lines. Seems to be going smoothly, no major problems or delays to report really. Good news as we've had a lot more to add recently.

That's pretty much everything from me today. If you need anything, just give us a bell. We never go home. EVER."

Nice update Nick! Last one for today is from... you guessed it Comms

Welcome to a very quiet comms desk. As I write this there is only myself representing Comms here. Peter is probably in a meeting, as it James. Bob and Matt have left for the day and Mand took a couple of days off. So, onto the festivities. I've been working in excel and am starting to see grid shapes wherever I look. I've also helped out with some trickier CSC queries and made the odd venture to the forums. Matt's been getting things ready for the newsletter, which should start to be written soon. He's also been in a couple of forums. James has been beavering away like normal in the forums, he's also been on the phone a couple of times today. I don't think it was the speaking clock. Bob's been writing an email to send tomorrow and working through a particularly tricky problem. So with that I'll leave you with today's commic Have a good evening.

Anyone else out there having a bit of a disturbing over reaction to teh extra "m" in "commic" being used there? That's all from me tonight. I'm off climbing!