Its been a busy week at Ufindus

Well so far this week I have spent from Sunday through to Tuesday afternoon in Glasgow attending the Iomart group Board Meeting and doing some work on our Netintelligence division then it was a quick dash back to Lancaster to check up on the progress of QAD, our new and very sophisticated support system.

Work is going along great and I was able to run through a test which worked on most functions. Launch has been delayed until 5th February due to staff relocation so actually we have a little more time now. We have decided to use that time to build some more enhanced functionality into the system that was planned to be introduced later down the development road.

One of the exciting features about QAD is that we are making one person responsible for any customer support case. Now in a perfect world the agent would know the answer to every question and we wouldn't need to ask others to help out in fixing problems, but we all know it isn't a perfect world.

At Ufindus we have come up with a system that makes just one person responsible for a customers case and the case always remains with them. The agent can however pass on certain sub jobs to others to fix for him but the overall responsibility will always return to the person our customer knows they are dealing with. That's just one point of contact at Ufindus for any customer asking for something to be resolved.

Secondly we have created a service reception that means little or no waiting in a queue to speak to an agent. The Ufindus service reception opens a case for our customer and gives the customer an estimated call back time. Once the case is opened, the customer is given a number to call to speak directly with the agent if they are not on the phone. Yes that means direct contact with just one person. It truly will change the way people get support from Ufindus and will be a world apart from the majority of call centres.

To achieve all this we have developed, in-house, in just two weeks so far, a truly excellent support tracking application that will be rolled out across our offices during the first quarter of this year. We are confident it will completely change the experience of calling Ufindus to one that customers do not expect when calling large organisations such as us.

Exec Meeting

Yesterday I spent the whole day in our long monthly exec meeting at Ufindus. This meeting is used to review the day to day operations of the Ufindus business and to agree new actions and improvements and to decide the report that is made back to our parent group board meeting which takes place next week.

The Ufindus board has 5 executive directors including myself and our chief executive who make the day to day decisions and are responsible for normal operations.

I am also a member of the Iomart group board which is made up of the 5 executive directors 3 non executive directors and so have to spend a portion of my time each month considering the performance of the other two major businesses in the group.

It is difficult sometimes to take off your Ufindus hat and put on your Easyspace or Netintelligence hats but this is important because at group board level we have to take an objective view of the performance of the group rather than just Ufindus where I spend most days of the month.

Ufindus makes up approximately 75% of the group turnover and then Easyspace adds a further 20% with Netintelligence adding the remaining 5% although this business is seeing some excellent opportunities and increasing sales.

New Support and Fullfilment Centre

As a part of our changes to improve customer service at Ufindus we decided to merge many departments into one building that are currently distributed across two sites. We believe this will improve communication between our teams.

As a further step in this process we are moving our post and fulfilment centre into our Lancaster premises alongside our new support centre reception. It is hoped that this will make it easier for our admin teams to ensure that correct documentation is sent to customers promptly and in the event that some does go missing in the post we can issues duplicates easily. Currently documents are requested in the Lancaster site via an electronic system but posted from one of our Glasgow sites which doesn't allow us easily to verify procedures are working correctly. We believe this simple change will have major benefits to Ufindus customers.

Ufindus sends out over 60,000 postal items every month.

QAD is taking shape but thats not all

I write often about the systems we are developing to wholly improve our customers experience of Ufindus but don't talk as much about the day to day work that goes on in training our team etc.

This week we have made substantial progress on our new QAD system which will make us much better at tracking our customers support requests, no matter what reason they contact Ufindus but it will also provide us with a brand new way to monitor and judge the effectiveness of each agent who represents Ufindus on the phones to the customer.

We are not daft and we realise that the first contact needs to be answered quickly, polite, efficient and friendly so we make sure we build some trust in the customer who is contacting us that their issue is both important to us and WILL be resolved.

This week we commenced a training program that will see everyone in the organisation take basic training in fixing easy issues for our customers so that our teams don't get bogged down passing things to their colleagues that they could fix themselves in seconds. This training will include everyone from the top to the bottom. It includes me! I have had to start to learn some of the general support tasks too. Thankfully I know a good deal of the tasks already as I supervise the development of the systems that enable these tasks but I still have things to learn.

Across our organisation we can all do better to make our customers experience easier and during 2007 there will be seismic shift towards better standards within the business. Our customers will notice that far from providing the sometimes downright poor experience we have in the past they will find that Ufindus is providing a better experience than they are used to expecting from similar contacts they have to make in business. We are determined that they will no longer experience the call queueing hell that some UK businesses have become. Indeed we have always worked hard to make sure that our call centres are adequately staffed but at Ufindus now we are going to go even further. It wont all happen overnight, I wish it would but there is just too much to do but changes are happening every day and I am proud of the team here and their commitment to the customers we serve with an excellent product which ha sin the past been a little let down by our support and documentation.

Ufindus is an excellent product, lets not forget that. Customer service issues aside we are independently tracked as one of the busiest business directories in the UK driving huge amounts of traffic to our paying (and non paying) listings every day. Our accuracy is second to none. Take the test for yourselves, do a search on Ufindus and compare it to Thomson Local and see which is quicker and easier! Why not text yourself the number you found on Yell.com, its only 25pence or use Ufindus and its free!

QAD Development launch day

Today we held a large team meeting with all of the development team to brief them all to be able to get on with the QAD system. Each of our developers usually work mostly separately on projects and see them through to conclusion but because of the scale of this project and the very tight time-scales involved we have had to carefully plan the process and allocate small chunks of the process across the team and the development team manager will work closely to track the progress and bring the project together at the end.

QAD will be another revolution in the way we handle customer enquiries and we are sure will bring some very significant improvements to the way we are perceived by our customers.

I will keep you posted.

Back to work and on with QAD Development

We returned to work yesterday and were straight into the breach so to speak. Plans are forging ahead for many new roles at Ufindus to help increase our support skills and capability.

Today I spent the full day with most of the Ufindus management team planning the development cycle of our new QAD system. In fact we hoped to start work on this before xmas but we are a little behind. This week is the planning stage, we will spend another day tomorrow making sure that we have got the requirements just right and then Friday will be spent putting together a development plan and deciding who does what.

This system is another crucial improvement at Ufindus to ensure we deliver quality support and finance services to our customers. This system means that all support requests will be dealt with by the same person where possible from inception to conclusion. In an analysis of our support requirements we identified that nearly 55% of our support calls were from other departments within our own company and clearly this means that our customers are in competition with our own staff to get through to the Ufindus support teams. A lot of worked is being passed around by our departments who have been unable to deal with it correctly themselves in the past. Our new QAD system will encourage them to be able to deal with the problem themselves and will enforce them retaining ownership of the case so our customers know exactly who they are dealing with. We are sure this will be a huge improvement over our current support systems and in fact over most large companies who also use the departmental support structure system.

At Ufindus we are determined to deliver some of the highest levels of support in our industry and this is another step along that path.