New Referrals manager, spam email

Received this

"My name is Mark Kelly and I would like to introduce myself to you as the new Referrals Manager for PlusNet. This is a new role that the business has created to solely manage and improve the service offered to our Referring customers. As a customer who has referred, may I firstly take this opportunity to thank you for your support and for playing a part in the growth of PlusNet.

I'll give you some background about me. I used to be a referrer too! Before coming to take up a new challenge at PlusNet, I was a partner in a successful IT Consultancy company in Northern Ireland. As a PlusNet customer, I referred many of my clients up until early 2006, when the quality of service deteriorated and I, unfortunately, lost confidence.

Being a fairly involved member of the PlusNet online community, I had close contact with PlusNet and I was also an active member of the PlusNet UserGroup. From these associations stemmed an opportunity to join the team back in October 2006, initially as a Technical Shift Manager in the Customer Support Centre. It was a hard decision to make, leaving my business behind and relocating to England, but it has definitely been one of the best decisions of my life!

There is no point denying that over the past couple of years we've hurt ourselves a few times and caused our customers pain. Apologies are not enough to make up for that. But I honestly believe it's been one of the best learning experiences we could have had.

We're in a much better place right now. Since I started at PlusNet, I have witnessed a massive transformation in the way we work. We need to deliver on our promises; keep our platform and network stable; demonstrate that we're not going to break again; and provide an excellent, value-for-money, Broadband experience with unrivalled Customer Service.

You know what? I think we're in a position where we can really do that now. Last year, following the disruption caused by Upto-8Mb upgrades and badly managed LLU migrations, our call queues were often over an hour long. Today, they rarely breach 10 minutes. I'm proud to see that the results of our Customer Satisfaction Surveys are improving month on month, with May's result showing that 63% of our customers are either "Very" or "Extremely Satisfied" with their service.

My primary responsibility in my new role is to build a relationship with our referral community, enhance the service and benefits that our referring customers receive and, ultimately, to give our referrers the support they need and the confidence to refer again. I will be involved in everything we do internally too, with the intention of improving and driving benefits to the customer experience.

Over the coming weeks you will hear more from me about a revamp of our referral programme with enhanced benefits and offers.

In the meantime, however, I would like to point you in the direction of a dedicated 'Referrers' forum that we have created here http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php?board=18.0 on our new Community website. My team and I will be frequenting these forums, so please do pop in if you have any questions, comments or feedback.

Kind Regards,

Mark Kelly
Referrals Manager"

My account is set not to receive communications, so they spam me with this junk.

In reply to:

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<Full quote of spam cut>
My account is set not to receive communications, so they spam me with this junk.

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What is wrong with spamming? It is a lazy approach to communication. And what have you done? You have full quoted spam, rather than just mentioning the fact of the spam, or summarizing any relevant content. So you are relaying spam and too lazy to communicate properly. And yet you appear to claim to know better.

I'm surprised they are pumping out PR emails so soon after the email breach,
with answers still outstanding.

Well at least Mark has footballs, leaving a steady job to go to hell was a bold move.

Has footballs, but lost his marbles

But joking aside I hope he has made the right choice and helps get PN on the straight and narrow.

I'm not entirely use calling it spam is fair..

seb

If you use "Spam is e-mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients." as guidelines.

Did many recipients get this mail?.........Yes
Was is unsolicited by recipient?............Yes
("My account is set not to receive communications")

To this person can't see it classed as anything but Spam.

> Was is unsolicited by recipient?............Yes
> ("My account is set not to receive communications")

Ok.. maybe with the latter detail it was unwise (and probably a mistake) but really they've only sent it to people who referred others.. not random people on the net, so it doesn't fall into my "real spam" just "annoying e-mail" category.


seb

I'm no longer a customer of PlusNet and I received it....

Hi there.

In reply to:

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My account is set not to receive communications

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Apologies to you and anyone else who felt annoyed at receiving this communication from us, well me in particular.

I am assuming that you are opted out of marketing or product related email. As such and as this was deemed to be information and simply an introduction of me to our referral community it was sent to all of our referrers.

It is simply introducing my role and setting out my stall.

We really need to get back to concentrating on our referrers, as it is they who have helped us build this business and that is what I intend to do.

If the email caused you any annoyance, then please accept my apologies and bin it or use it for something useful, like lighting the BBQ

For those who are interested, we have kicked of a lively and very welcome debate on our community site. I'd love to discuss your thoughts, ideas and concerns regarding referring PlusNet there.

And Ged, not so sure about footballs and as for marbles...........only time will tell :P

Take care