It never rains but it pours on Customer Street
At 3pm yesterday our local BT exchange had a failure that left our head office and support centre without internet connectivity. As all our systems are web based and the data is held offsite in one of our secure data centres we were unable to do any work for the last three hours of our working day and nearly 200 people were frustrated in their roles.
I personally oversaw the issue due to the seriousness and despite many, many phone calls to our service provider Thus plc, we were still off until 3am. What was more frustrating was the complete lack of call backs and coherent strategy on their part. We were left calling them to ask for progress reports and despite calling them at 9.45pm to ask them to update their record to change the contact number on the issue to my mobile number (from our technical managers) I had not received any updates at midnight. Unbelievably when I called them they had lost any record of the updated contact details and had tried to call the old number on the account to tell us the fault was resolved. It wasn't and they hadn't tested it and I pointed this out and off we went again.
At 3am BT resolved the fault but I have every confidence that had we not chased constantly we would not have had the issue resolved.
Now the purpose of this post is two fold. Firstly let me apologise to anyone who is waiting for a call back from your Customer Street agent because unfortunately our sophisticated work tracking system (QAD) is completely web based and runs from our data centres and so our teams could not access their diaries and call backs or indeed any new support issues.
Furthermore it has given us some useful training and learning material to show how not to deal with a customer and you can be assured that my team at Customer Street are constantly learning and improving our systems to ensure that we never provide the levels of support that are offered by some organisations and get call centres such a bad name.
At Customer Street we employ a full time "Business Process Manager" and you can read his own blog. Mark is tasked by me to root out every small problem and track every failing in our organisation. Gradually, day by day we make some small and some large improvements but we never stop striving for perfection and I am confident that our customers are aware of how fast things have changed around here.
I personally oversaw the issue due to the seriousness and despite many, many phone calls to our service provider Thus plc, we were still off until 3am. What was more frustrating was the complete lack of call backs and coherent strategy on their part. We were left calling them to ask for progress reports and despite calling them at 9.45pm to ask them to update their record to change the contact number on the issue to my mobile number (from our technical managers) I had not received any updates at midnight. Unbelievably when I called them they had lost any record of the updated contact details and had tried to call the old number on the account to tell us the fault was resolved. It wasn't and they hadn't tested it and I pointed this out and off we went again.
At 3am BT resolved the fault but I have every confidence that had we not chased constantly we would not have had the issue resolved.
Now the purpose of this post is two fold. Firstly let me apologise to anyone who is waiting for a call back from your Customer Street agent because unfortunately our sophisticated work tracking system (QAD) is completely web based and runs from our data centres and so our teams could not access their diaries and call backs or indeed any new support issues.
Furthermore it has given us some useful training and learning material to show how not to deal with a customer and you can be assured that my team at Customer Street are constantly learning and improving our systems to ensure that we never provide the levels of support that are offered by some organisations and get call centres such a bad name.
At Customer Street we employ a full time "Business Process Manager" and you can read his own blog. Mark is tasked by me to root out every small problem and track every failing in our organisation. Gradually, day by day we make some small and some large improvements but we never stop striving for perfection and I am confident that our customers are aware of how fast things have changed around here.
posted by Stuart Forrest at
10:23
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