Hello there readers!
Straight to the skinny this week, as it’s late and I want to arrive at work on time tomorrow morning 
I hope all the Plusnet mothers out there have been suitably pampered today!
Here’s Kate with the Finance update:
I was lucky enough to have 2 days off this week so it feels like Friday has come early, hurrah! I’ve been working on improving some reporting, which generally involves lots of spreadsheets. 2 days off AND Excel – sounds like a great week to me!
John has been quite giddy as he’s just booked a skiing holiday somewhere near Mont Blanc. To me, snow = cold. brrr.
Not much to report in terms of other work in the department, we’ve generally being adding things up, sometimes subtracting, and occasionally multiplying. Well, WE weren’t multiplying – that would be quite scary.
For those cinema goers, I saw Legion this week, which, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve pretty much seen the film. There’s so many films out at the moment i’m not sure what is next on the cards. Can anyone recommend anything?
Joke for the week:
A lorry full of tortoises was in a head on crash with a van full of terrapins. It was a turtle disaster.
A very hurried Jen from HR had this to say:
We are very busy in HR as we have been having lots of people in for interviews and assessment days, in between that we’ve been making call backs and sorting out contracts. We’ve got 25 new starters on Monday to induct as well, so all hands on deck there.
No sign of it slowing down either so, if you know anyone looking for a job, send them here.
TGI Friday, eh?
And finally Alban from the Faults team.
I am Alban the Faults Team Leader. It was another hot week in Durban, great weather for the beach. We had Steve Woods grace us with his presence here at the office.
The PROV and Faults teams have been performing exceptionally well this past week. The PROV team managed to end the week with an all time low of 224 tickets. They have managed to bring the pools down to just 126 tickets at 10:00 am this morning. This is the lowest it’s been for this year. Well done to Rohan and his team for all the hard work and dedication!
The Faults have managed to bring 90% of their tickets within SLA and have been primarily focusing on increasing Customer Satisfaction. We have seen better results recently! We have also been able to resource to our Sheffield team.
Well done to both the teams. Karen I hope you have a fantastic time in India and China. I personally can’t wait for this weekend’s Barclays Premier League matches, things are heating up! To all, enjoy the weekend.
And that’s your lot 
See ya!
) telling you how to do it here.Many of our customers will be aware that they can set a maximum monthly price limit on their broadband service, by using a tool called Data Transfer Watch (DTW).
Combined with View My Broadband Usage (VMBU) this allows you to have complete control over your usage, and your monthly bill from us.
Those of you who aren’t familiar with DTW can take a look at the Community Support Library article I’ve just published on the subject here.
Remember, if you have an account which doesn’t have a set allowance, or doesn’t allow you to purchase extra usage, this tool isn’t available to you.
If you’ve ever fancied writing some content, or if there’s something you’d like to see a help page on, why not have a go at writing a Community Support Library article yourself? There’s an article (in the Support Library funnily enough ) telling you how to do it here.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them in our forums.
Mand
Hello readers!
It’s been an odd week in Plusnet towers, we’re currently in the middle of refurbing and rearranging large parts of the building so there’s been an awful lot of moving going on. It’s been difficult to get much out of people due to the general busyness this causes, resulting in a slightly different approach to this weeks posting. Apologies if it’s not to your taste but we’ll get back on things next week!
We can certainly start things off in a normal fashion with a report from Mark from the CSC…
Greetings from Mark on the Customer Service & Home Moves Provisioning team.
The end of a cold but bright week in Sheffield, and a busy week for us here in the Sheffield Customer Service Centre.
Firstly may I take this opportunity to welcome the newer members of our team who have joined us over the last few weeks, too numerous to mention individually.
We have had yet another busy week dealing with customers moving addresses, dealing with the usual 150-200 move order tickets per day, along with the many calls we have received. For the most part, they have all gone smoothly with customers feeling very satisfied with how we have handled their moves.
The customer service staff have been also very busy this week dealing with many enquiries. Most issues have been handled quickly and efficiently due to the afore-mentioned increase to our customer service staff. As usual, most customers calling in have left with a satisfying resolution to their questions.
So, as a well earned weekend looms, it’s time to say so long.
Now unfortunately that was the only post I could get! :’(
Rather than end it there, I’ve decided to present you with a series of ‘jokes’ (i use that term loosely mind you) that are doing the rounds in the office at the moment. There’s a lot of new starters in these parts at the moment and they’ve took things to a whole new level…
In no particular order…
- News just in: Police station toilet stolen…cops have nothing to go on
- What’s blue and square? An orange in disguise….
- What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back? A stick!
- Who’s the coolest person in the hospital? The Ultrasound Guy
- Who’s the coolest person in the hospital when the Ultrasound guy isn’t at work? The Hip Replacement Guy!
- The local newspaper was holding a ‘pun’ competition, where you had to send in your bad puns. I sent ten puns in to give myself more chance of winning, but no pun in ten did.
And finally…
- I came third at the National Sun Tanning Championships… I got a bronze
Normal service will be resumed next week, see ya then!
Some of you may remember the post I published last month about us lighting all four segments of a new 622Mbps central pipe? If you don’t then you can read it here.
Guess what? It’s that time again! (… well almost)
Over recent days engineers have been busy putting the final touches to the installation of our next 622Mbps central, affectionately referred to as ‘Plusnet 16′.
We’ve now lit the first two ’segments’ of this pipe which is basically half of it (there are four 155Mbps segments per 622Mbps pipe).
This means that there’s now more bandwidth to be shared amongst everybody on ‘Up to 8Mb’ 20CN platform.
Customers connecting to the new segment will see their traffic routed through the gateway known as pcl-ag02
We’ve activated this bandwidth to accommodate the expected increase in customer numbers over the coming months, and the almost guaranteed increase in average usage as the year progresses.
When new capacity is added to the network, it takes time for it to balance and for a representative proportion of the customer base to connect to the new segments. In order to speed up this process we might need to briefly disconnect some broadband customers from the Internet. If we decide to do this then we’ll announce further details as a planned maintenance notice nearer the time.
We’ve been continuing to add bandwidth to our 21CN network (Up to 20Mbps) over recent months too!
Hello Readers!
Welcome to the final EOW posting for February. No messing about from me this week, Lee from the Faults Team is the first of our two and a bit postings for this week…
Hello, it’s Lee here, at the back end of a month long secondment on the ever brilliant Business support team.
Things work a little differently over here to the Residential side of things, as we have strict SLAs to meet with our business and Partner customers. As a result, and the Business team being a small core team, you tend to do pretty much everything as regards a broadband lifecycle. Provisioning, email, faults, billing, sales and cancellations, everything! It’s a lot of information to remember, but you learn a whole lot in doing so, which is the main aim of the secondment!
Ultimately this means our business customers get a superb level of support from the onset, as whoever you speak to has all the answers. Think of business support as being manned solely by broadband gurus!
Chris has been holding my hand this month (ooo er!), and has been training me on all facets of the job. A lot of stuff I know already through experience in other departments, but the differences in how these are actioned and applied to business customers are vast, so there really is a lot to learn and expand upon.
As a brief aside, I’ve also learnt a lot about sharks. Completely nothing to do with business phone and broadband, but my colleague Mark is already counting down the 6 months to Shark Week on Discovery, which is apparently the greatest week on television. His favourite shark is the Sculpted Hammerhead, apparently…
Anyway, due to a bit of an internal refurb, I’ve also migrated south with the team to the ground floor (really must stop with these wildlife references). All of our recruitment means a bit of a re-jigging of desks and all sorts, so we’re down here for a few months while our new home permanent home is sorted out. Give us a wave if you drive past (providing it doesn’t snow again of course).
I’m back to normal shifts from tomorrow, so you’ll all have to have a good weekend for me!
The reason I said 2 and a bit postings earlier was because shortly after Lee sent this, Mark himself weighed in with a quick correction…
*Scalloped hammerhead
You learn something new everyday! Next and finally we have Kate from Finance japes and jokes…
Greetings from Finance!
Today is a sad day, as we have lost our good friend ‘The Chief’. Mark’s plant has been part of the department for 2 years, that’s long enough to be entitled to redundancy pay you know. We will be having a minutes silence at 11am on Monday and pray that he makes many plant friends in foliage heaven.
However, we have a reason to celebrate too, as we welcome Daisy in to our team. She has been busy learning the ropes but is quickly getting to grips with it all.
James has had his head buried in Intercompany trading and banking matters.
As for me, this week i’ve been preparing for next week’s month end processes, and have also progressed with automating some reports – I do like Microsoft excel, have I mentioned that before?
I’m off to see The Crazies at the cinema tonight, and i’ll hopefully finally get to see Where the Wild Things Are tomorrow.It’s also payday, so a swift pint (or lemonade in my case) is definitely in order.
Joke for the week:
Q: What is round and nasty?
A: A Vicious circle.Ta ta for now.
Yikes, they don’t get any better do they!
Thanks for reading, see you next time.
In the coming weeks lots of Sport Relief events will be taking place up and down the country, with the purpose of bringing the nation together to get active, raise cash and save lives. You might have already heard about The BT Sport Relief Million Pound Bike Ride for instance, where a host of celebrities will be pedalling day and night through wind, rain and tough terrain in a non-stop relay from John O’Groats to Land’s End.
This year Plusnet is proud to support the challenge for the very first time, so we’ll be taking part in ‘Chat for Change’ day on Friday 26th February 2010.
With your help, we’ll donate 1p to Sport Relief for every call you make from your Plusnet Home Phone on the day
Make sure you pick up the phone on 26th February, call your friends and family, and have a conversation that’ll make a difference.
To find out about all the challenges, or for more info on what else you can to do help, have a look at the Sport Relief website:
Sport Relief is an initiative of Comic Relief, registered charity 326568 (England/Wales); SC039730 (Scotland)
Hello Readers!
Another week goes by and another EOW report written on a Sunday night. The extra two days have allowed me to learn a new lesson – if a weather warning is issued every day then eventually it will be right!
Yes, the cold, snow and slush is back in Sheffield once again, has there been any in other areas?
On with the posts then.. just two this week and My Digital Care colleague Mand is up first…
Well it’s been another hectic week on the Digital Care team, with project work, helping out the CSC and forum-ing it up.
Matt’s been ill the last few days, so get well soon Matt.
Chris has done lots of reporting, which means he gets to give me more work
Andy has been improving help pages.
I’ve been doing lots of project work, going to meetings, and doing tickets and forum work in the meantime.
Bob has been sending out notifications about network activities, taking care of our customers via the medium of Twitter, and reneging on an agreement to come to work dressed like this
Today has been largely taken up with Walk the Dinosaur – the song (not the dance, we’re too busy caring digitally to dance at work.
).
Have a good weekend, cya next week!
Secondly and finally it’s Kate with more Finance news and awesome jokes…
Hello Hello Hello
I’ve had lots of meetings this week. I usually sit on the 3rd floor of our building and the meetings are usually on the ground floor; I did worry about the difference in altitude but it didn’t seem to cause too much of a problem.
Mark has been learning about accruals. I could explain to you what an accrual is, but I like my audience to stay awake.
James isn’t around for me to ask what he’s been up to, but I do know he had a club bagel for lunch today – he does love those bagels.
Other than that, it’s been general payments and number crunching from us.
I did see Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief which i really enjoyed, i’m even tempted to watch it again.Joke for the week:
Feeling Charitable, a man says to a homeless guy, “Paint my porch out back and I’ll give you £200″.
Later that day the homeless man knocks on the door, “I’m done; but by the way – it’s a mercedes”.Have a good one.
That’s all for this week, see ya!
Stop & look at this before you waste any more time!!!
Anyone who has attempted to plan, organise & run an event, be it with customers / partners / friends will have experience the pain of trying to track invites, RSVP’s, multiple contacts & the on-going challenges of collecting registration / ticket fees (we have all heard the “I will pay you later” line…).
Eventbrite is a fast growing ‘social commerce’ tool; simple it allows you to manage the invitation / tracking / reminders / transaction elements of organising an event from one place. If you want to schedule email reminders – no problem, promote via social networks like Facebook & Twitter – dead easy & collect funds in a secure simple manner – yep!
Click through on this link and let us know if you think this is a valuable application – the aim of these weekly blogs is to share with you what we think are the hot applications and services and see what you think. Also please use the Facebook & Twitter retweet buttons on the post to share this further.
James
Britain’s most successful gymnast in history, world champion and Olympian, Beth Tweddle is supporting our Manchester campaign.
Beth will be joining us at the Pass Plusnet On event at the Chill Factor-e, Manchester on Saturday 27th February 4-6pm.
There will be an interactive game to play and the person with the highest score wins free broadband for a year.
So, if you’re in the area come along and say hello!
Hello Readers!
It’s a little later than planned (did you think I’d forgotten? ) but here we are, with an End of Week at the actual end of the week – unless you are one of those people that think the week starts on Sunday.
The last time I was here, I said I’d try to find out what HR have been up to, as they’ve been absent recently. It took a little badgering but here’s Jen!
Recruitment, recruitment and ooh….wait…nope, more recruitment.
It’s keeping us very busy at the moment! Not to mention all our lovely day-to-day HR processes.
And…we’re still even managing to make time to work on benefits for employees. Watch this space for more details….
Recruiting then? I thought there’d been a lot of new faces about just recently! Next we have Paul from Customer Options, he’s worried about the weather!
Hi its Paul from the customer options team. Well its been 2 weeks now since we moved to a different floor of the building. We now have a more elevated view out of the window (Not that we just sit and look out of it all day).
We’re still seeing lots of calls coming in asking about their packages and i know our sales side are busy busy signing up new customers and welcoming them to the Plusnet experience.
Besides been busy the usual chats around this time of year are about valentines cards and if your going to receive any or if your sending any. (This includes the usual joke about the postman having to bring a van to deliver peoples sackful’s of cards)
Then theres Shrove Tuesday, how do you like your pancakes. Sweet or savoury.But back to work. Finding out about our competitors and the offers they have and seeing what we can offer our customers.
We’re also finding from the recent advertising campaigns in London and our new one in Manchester we’re receiving lots of calls to our sales team wanting to know more about the packages and signing up for packages.Well thats all from me for this week and us here in the customer options team wish you all a good weekend (Hopefully the snow doesnt come like they say it might)
Did it snow anywhere? It didn’t in Sheffield. Now the bit you’ve all been waiting for… here’s Kate with the latest from Finance and more ‘jokes’
Hello all!
It seems awfully quiet in finance today, with James, Frances and Ryan all on holiday.
This week I have been catching up on odd jobs that had been put on the back bench during month end, and preparing presentation slides on performance. Other than that, i’ve been on the drum kit again (on band hero) – i can see i’m destined for stardom.
Mark has been doing the usual weekly jobs, paying suppliers, taking care of The Chief, etc.
Sally has been a little bit tired today after her band played in Leeds last night, I hear it was a pretty good gig too.
I’m planning on seeing Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief this weekend which i’m very much looking forward to. It helps to have unlimited cinema passes. I guess i’m a cheap valentine this year…Joke for the week:
Q: What’s the difference between a weasel and a stoat?
A: a weasel is weasely weckognisable and a stoat is stoatally different.Have a great weekend.
Groan! Last but by no means least is Chris from Digital Care..
This week’s been full of work, work and laughing at Bob.
We’ve been keeping the forums manned day to day and helping our friends over in the CSC out by doing some tickets.
In between tea drinking we’ve been getting slightly concerned at the apple on Mand’s desk. It’s still got a smily face on it, but looks less than happy otherwise.
There isn’t much else to report from the good ship Digital Care, so with that in mind have a good weekend and we’ll see you next week.
Thanks for reading, see you next week!
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