Details of PlusNet Restructure, Customer Support

Thought this might be interesting to anyone who hasn't seen it, and for discussion...


Quoted from the PUG forum, which was a quote from the Service Status:

In reply to:

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On Friday evening, the PlusNet UserGroup revealed that a major re-organisation was underway within PlusNet. The primary aim of this has been to put customers back at the heart of our business, and the details we have shared will hopefully prove interesting and useful to our customers.


The linked PDF document contains our new organisational charts and discusses what we have changed and how we expect this to improve both our working environment at PlusNet, and the experience all of our customers receive.

Also, we have now published our latest update to our Customer Support improvement and Evolution plan, and this may also make interesting reading for our customers.

PlusNet Re-organisation: http://www.plus.net/support/download/plusnet_reorg.pdf

Latest CSC Update: http://www.plus.net/support/download/csc_evolution.pdf

Both documents are also linked from the latest news sections of our portal.


With Regards,

Ian Wild

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I had a good friend who used to say "When people did not know what to do to resolve a problem, they would want to move the furniture around".

Feels like that at Pn.

It'd be interesting to know exactly how much input Ian Wild and Alistair Wyse had in creating those doucments -- according to the PDF document properties, they were written by some mysterious character called 'mpotesta'.

Edited by chowells (Thu 31-Aug-06 00:36:29)

I have to say that I find this the first proper re-plan and it is clear that thought and planning has been put into this properly which I like. I think it might work but with one proviso- PN must ensure less network problems in order to reduce the support calls and then good CSC agents to deal with support tickets. They need to get training improved and increase internal communication issues and some of these changes do indeed address this.

Apart from that they might actually be able to get a proper network that doesn't fall down at every step and that has to be good for the end user. I do have my reservations on the timescale that these changes will take to produce results but I think PN have finally produced a long-term and viable change for the better. I wish them luck.

In reply to:

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they were written by some mysterious character called 'mpotesta'.

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Guess its Marco Potesta the Marketing Director

I think that there's some useful information in the customer support centre update, but I think some caution is needed when judging the "marked improvement" in outstanding tickets.

This snapshot has been taken after a Bank Holiday weekend push in which 4785 tickets were closed, and a snapshot taken last Friday would presumably have generated a significantly less favourable snapshot?

Also, when compared against Alistair Wyse's update on 24/7/06 ("79 Customer Support questions and 171 fault diagnosis requests outstanding"), the tickets outstanding after the weekend push (

Edited by cos1 (Thu 31-Aug-06 00:57:33)

The snapshot was also taken just a couple of days after they closed 300 (or was it 400?) tickets "by mistake". A very handy way to cut the ticket numbers... (not that it's made it any easier for PN though as they've had to firefight that problem too)

I do think it's good to have these stats though. I've said before that we should have an "oldest unread ticket" and "oldest read ticket" and "ticket with the most updates" sort of stats... what we really need is these stats *real time* on the portal, rather than one-off's.

Whilst I wish them (and customers!) the best of luck, I'm not going to fully believe it until I see it. We've been promised improvements endless times for months on end, and whilst some things improve it still feels like a downwards spiral/slope/pit. Structure diagrams are all nice and everything, but if it's still going through the same bottlenecks or there are still the same problems (no matter where/what they are) then there will still be the problems. I can't see how the new structure really helps to improve the service from the view of call waiting times, ticket times, etc... sure, might make fixing things quicker due to the better structure, which may well lead to a cut in ticket/call times (and the need to raise the ticket/make the call in the first place) but surely that's going to be a longterm thing and something we're simply not going to see until everything is working consistently well.

Also a little "hmm" about the new fault line which is going to be opened. 0800, 0845, 090x or what? And why a new number just to report the faults if it's an 0845? might as well just use the same number - surely the queue is going to be the same length (which is why I wonder if it'll actually be a different rate, hence the need for a different number, rather than just a quicker route through the menus)

That's a mighty long-winded way of saying they've got rid of the Chief Operating Officer. Strange that they make no editorial reference to this most significant of their changes.

The rest of it looks like a series of missed opportunities to me. Too many of the people responsible for making the decisions which have led PlusNet to the brink of meltdown are still there running the company.

Oh well. Ca change, plus ca change. PlusNet can get excited about this restructure internally butI doubt it will persuade many long-suffering customers that the future is brighter. I would guess that most customers know - and care - little about the internal structure so I can't see the majority buying into this.

PlusNet should have taken this golden opportunity to prove their commitment to customer service by publishing a Customer Charter setting a timeline for specific processes and improvements -- and giving rebates to customers if the deadlines are missed. Customers might then believe....

Simon

... the same M Potesta who pulled PN reps from the AG boards. That he's still got a job just signifies to me that the knife didn't go half deep enough.