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[Carol]

Good Afternoon

As I suggested in the posting I made pre Xmas holidays, we have been concentrating on quality in the CSC and driving this up in line with quicker turnaround times on tickets and calls. We have a dedicated TSM on what we call QoS, every week, who spends more than 75% of their time working with Analysts to give feedback and support on how they can improve their delivery and the customer experience.

We understand that this provides an internal view and that we need to understand how the  experience is changing from a customers perspective. we have for at least the last year, sent out an email to random caller asking a number of questions about their experience to understand which areas we need to concentrate on and be an area for focus. This is collated each Month and we review this as a management team and share this with the rest of the business.

I thought this is something you might find interesting and helps to show you the progress we are making driving towards our goal of quality customer support.

The slides are self explanatory, however should you have any queries then we will be happy to answer any of these.

I will provide further information as and when this become available.

Please let me know if you find this useful, if so then I wont promise to post this monthly but will endeavour to give you updates regularly, Luke will be owning this moving forward so I will work with him to update you, we dont do the preso every month as this is a large manual overhead, but once a quarter would seem feasible.

Regards

Carol

[jelv1]

Figure 18 Before calling us did you attempt to use the 'Online Help Assistant' in the Help & Support section of the website? Might this decline be because as people realise that call waiting times are down they are less likely to try to help themselves?

I was pleasantly surprised by these results. I would expect that people who received a less than satisfactory service would be more inclined to complete the survey so these results may be a little worse than the actual situation.

[Carol]

As with all contact mediums as it become easier to get hold of us then Customers are more likely to call, we monitor this by the number of calls offered and the numbers of tickets raised, we would then look to re balance this, however, not sure how

We also would expect most of the customers completing this to be upset with us for come reason, so again we are all happy to see that it paints a quite positive picture, but also gives us plenty of food for thought for us to concentrate and focus on moving forward.

Regards

Carol

[glloyd]

What slides?

I thought this is something you might find interesting and helps to show you the progress we are making driving towards our goal of quality customer support.

The slides are self explanatory, however should you have any queries then we will be happy to answer any of these.

[JBailey]

Carol attached a powerpoint presentation to her initial post.

[northbritish]

As with all contact mediums as it become easier to get hold of us then Customers are more likely to call, we monitor this by the number of calls offered and the numbers of tickets raised, we would then look to re balance this, however, not sure how

IMHO you shouldn't try too hard to rebalance it.  People like to talk to people.  It is often easier to discuss problems and resolve them quickly by talking than it is by e-mail (or in Plusnets case ticket tennis).  In a market saturated by cut-throat broadband offers the quality and quantity of customer support will be what distinguishes the winners from the losers.  Zen are taking customers from Plusnet despite the higher price because, in part, of their customer support.

The customer is always right (even when you think he is wrong ). If the customer prefers contact by the medium of telephone don't try to "re-balance" him, or you will simply re-balance him towards your competitors who are happy with contact in the manner he wants rather than the manner that suits them.

[nick]

If the customer prefers contact by the medium of telephone don't try to "re-balance" him, or you will simply re-balance him towards your competitors who are happy with contact in the manner he wants rather than the manner that suits them.

This is very true and the reason we would never consider excluding telephone support entirely. However a proportion of customers call in (a) because they either don't realise they can get support online (which would save the time and cost of a call) or (b) they would like to use the website to self-serve but we haven't yet delivered a tool which allows them to carry out the tasks themselves.

Our aim has to be to help these customers by both setting an early expectation about how they can seek assistance and providing the automation to allow them to manage their account without intervention, in most cases. This is the 'rebalance' we seek, along of course, with providing better quality written replies in Contact Us which would encourage more reliance on this medium.

[JBailey]

Hi Nick

It's always important to remember that a balance has to be achieved.

There are certain things that have to be dealt with via the ticketing system, most importantly faults/provisioning issues.  It's also worth remember that a decent proportion of our customers will always prefer to raise tickets rather than speaking to someone, so whilst, I do agree that a vast number of people will always want to speak to someone, we do need a balance in place to accommodate those that wish to speak to us online.

[northbritish]

I was just suspicious that the re-balancing was going to be done by pulling CS agents off the phones to answer more tickets and, by increasing phone wait times whilst reducing ticket response times, "encourage" users to use the Plusnet preffered methods of communicating.

This would be underhand, almost impossible to prove was going on, and certain to drive frustrated customers trying to get through by phone to migrate out to other providers with better response times.

[lmartin]

Yep - which is why it is important we get the balance right.  Often it's much easier to solve and close down a user's issue over the phone anyway - and thats great.

For those of you that don't know Nick, he is a Technical Shift Manager in the CSC.  Working alongside Mark Kelly (doing the same kind of role).

[Pendragon]

Just popped in to say congratulations to the person or persons who compiled the presentation. Well thought out explanations and no flashy wipes, pop ups etc and you mixed the good with the bad without holding back.

From the ‘Stats’ presented it looks like you are at last beginning to see a faint light at the end of your very long tunnel and getting there at last. Getting a ‘Slap Down’ from your public always seems to focus the minds of the higher echelons of a company and improvements often follow. Congrats to all the hard work of your colleagues and lets hope 07 pays off for all of you.

As far as I know there is no link to the document from the Force 9 forum and I would have thought this would be a bit of good PR for us to read as well, so could a staff member post the message in the forum with a link?

Many thanks, Colin.

[lmartin]

Thankyou for your comments.  We've certainly made fantastic progress over the last few months and that is continuing.  We'll keep you all updated with further presentations and results as they are made available internally.

[mbeckett]

Hi

I've posted this over in F9, with a handy little link.

[Pendragon]

Thanks mand  .

Regards, Colin

[quantic]

Lots of people are not sufficiently practised to use web sites for fault finding, and therefore prefer to hear a friendly voice.

Furthermore PN web sites appear to be compiled by those skilled in the art of such, and do not seem to appreciate what the customer wants.

Your 0845 lines are not cheap; in this day of VoIP can you not offer a generic address Skype and others can use?