Back in April, we hinted at preparations to release a wiki, with hopes it would one day replace our current Help section. Well, now it’s here - we are proud to announce the beta release of Westnet MyHelp.

You can visit it here : Home page: http://myhelp.westnet.com.au/

Unlike a traditional knowledgebase, a wiki is a special type of website with the ability to be edited directly by its readers. For the last year, we’ve been using a wiki internally and with great success – so the natural progression was to bring our members into the fold.

In other words, we’re giving our members the chance to share their knowledge by adding and editing articles on the MyHelp section of our website. Plus, we’ll be the first telecommunications company in Australia, and possibly the world, to introduce this sort of wiki for our members.

Westnet MyHelp will be launched today, Monday 24 September. It is a beta launch and will run alongside our current Help pages during evaluation.

We’ve tried to maintain the look and feel of our current help pages where possible, so it remains easy to learn how to use the wiki. For example, there are still portal pages with quick links and top FAQs. Behind these pages, related articles are divided into spaces. You’d generally find an ADSL modem’s set-up guide in the ‘Broadband’ space. Articles also have labels (e.g. categories) so related information can be linked across spaces and found with a single click.

All new/updated articles will be reviewed and moderated by a Westnet staff member. Whether or not it was approved or rejected will be clearly indicated at the top of each article.

Any questions on the release can be directed to myhelp@westnet.com.au.

Westnet MyHelp Update!

Following the recent release of Westnets’ new online wiki MyHelp, we are pleased to announce the site has now been added to the Westnet Neighbourhood.

What does this mean for our customers?

Basically any online activity a customer carries out on the MyHelp site will not be counted towards their download allowance, meaning they can enjoy unlimited use of this powerful new resource and have to not worry it will be contributing to their download allowance or be the cause of any excess charges on their Westnet internet account.

How will we be letting customers know?

The Westnet website has been updated to advise of this change.

We are delighted to announce the full launch of Westnet Satellite Broadband service today (Wednesday 19 September 2007).

With support from the Australian Government, we’re also participating in the Australian Broadband Guarantee (ABG) initiative. You can check your eligibility via http://bcoms.dcita.gov.au/BSL/. If you’re eligible, you will receive a complimentary standard Satellite connection (valued at $2,750)! Plus, as an introductory offer, members will also receive the first six months of Satellite internet at half price.
The range of Satellite plans are available on our website, (www.westnet.com.au/internet.satellite)

Westnet is introducing a new webmail platform full of powerful features designed to make webmail intuitive and easier to use.

The change over will take place in a staggered fashion (in ‘groups’ of customers), kicking off in November 2007 with an expected finish by the end of the year. Change over should take place overnight (midnight to 4am), on weeknights (Monday to Thursday) during this period.

Existing members should experience only a minor interruption of up to 5 minutes to their service during the migration – but existing emails, address book, tasks, notes, calendars, sent, archived and forwarded email, folders, and email flags will all be carried over to the new platform.

The new features include:

• innovative new design
• integration between web pages and your mailbox
• greater email management functionality
• enjoy a faster and more powerful search function
• use tags and message flags
• preview URL images and documents
• import calendars
• exporting emails
• share calendars

There will be two plans made available from launch; a free email plan to all Westnet members, and a more powerful plan available to those customers who currently pay for email protection.

All Westnet webmail users will be migrated to their new email account which will offer greater functionality and a new look, when compared with their existing Westnet webmail.

From early 2008, members can also opt to upgrade to higher end plan offering cutting edge functionality including mobile integration – a world class email experience to be offered at reasonable prices.

We’ll place more information about the new email platform on the Westnet website over the coming weeks to help members get a sneak preview of the system

If you have ever received spam informing you about a possible increase in a stock’s share price you have been targeted by a “Pump and Dump” spamming campaign. The latest effort (see above) was the text in an attached PDF document to unsuspecting recipients.

Opening the attachment isn’t harmful to your PC however if you were unfortunate enough to invest your hard earned cash into the stock you may find yourself with a worthless investment.

Australian IT has an article about this particular case:
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Around April of this year I was commenting on Whirlpool about a big training and recruitment drive underway within Westnet to continue to lift the level of our customer service. I thought an update from me was probably well overdue on our progress, in particular within Technical Support. I figured the best way to do this was by sharing a few of the statistics that I use (along with feedback from members, agents and staff) to measure how we are travelling in Technical Support at Westnet.

The three most important result areas that I look at are the responses to the feedback requests we send to members after each interaction with a Westnet staff member, the percentage of calls we answer within 120 seconds and our oldest “incomplete”. In partnership with direct feedback from speaking with staff and members, these are my key drivers and what myself and the customer service leadership group within Westnet have in their mind every day.

The responses to the feedback questionnaires we send to members following each interaction with a Westnet staff member are our most important result area. The responses and collated results provide a snapshot of whether we are living up to our mantra of exceeding our member’s expectations. If we drop the ball in any area of our customer service delivery we see this reflected in these results very quickly and very sharply. In June, 97.82% of the 2520 respondents to the Technical Support questionnaire said they were either “Happy” or “Very Happy” with the service provided. In July, 98.24% of the 3003 respondents were either “Happy” or “Very Happy” with the service provided.

It is pretty obvious that the sooner we pick up a call from one of our members the better so we put a lot of emphasis on ensuring we have the correct number of trained staff available to handle incoming calls. During unexpected influxes of calls this is obviously not always possible but we are introducing new procedures and technologies on a regular basis to try to limit the impact of these events (stay tuned for more information on this in my next post). In June, Technical Support answered 73.82% of their 52362 calls within the 120 seconds threshold. In July, we answered 80.79% of Technical Support calls within 120 seconds.

Our other key measure is what we refer to as our “oldest incomplete”. “Incomplete” is a piece of internal Westnet terminology that we use to describe an unresolved member issue. If a member calls our Technical Support Team for help and if at the conclusion of the call the member or staff member is not certain that the problem has been fully resolved, the issue will be recorded as an “incomplete” which is then the responsibility of that particular staff member to follow through to completion. Our target is to have all incompletes updated within 7 days meaning that we aim to revisit unresolved issues every 7 days. This usually involves a quick courtesy call to the member to see how things are going. Technical Support’s oldest incomplete is currently 10 days old so we are slightly outside our desired target.

The team puts a huge effort into keeping these incompletes up to date and following up with members how their Westnet service is performing. It is a great source of satisfaction for the whole team when we manage to get within that 7 day mark and a great source of satisfaction for me personally when I see the feedback come in from members who are surprised that we actually called them to talk about an issue. I am personally a massive fan of the incomplete system and used to love following up on unresolved issues when I was in Technical Support. I equally love the dedication that I see our staff have about getting issues resolved for members.

In summary, things are travelling pretty well again in Technical Support and our wait times, feedback results and incompletes are now at quite consistent levels. We are however still striving to push our service level even higher. To this end we are continuing to recruit new staff, place even more emphasis on training for staff and also investing in new call centre technology to make things easier, faster and more accurate for staff and members. I’ll elaborate on this a little further in my next post.

Westnet’s commitment to customer service was recognised last Thursday night (19th of July) at the Customer Service Institute of Australia’s annual “Australian Service Excellence Awards”. Westnet was announced as the WA winner of the Medium Business category and also received the only “Highly Commended” in the National section of the same category. Other companies in attendance on the night included ANZ, National Australia Bank, Telstra, Westfield, Medicare Australia, Fone Zone, AXA, Ergon Energy, MLC, IBM and St George.

Eric Cain (Westnet’s General Manager) and I were fortunate enough to be in attendance at the event at Star City Casino in Sydney to personally accept the awards. We used the opportunity that a short acceptance speech in front of over 500 people provided to thank the members, agents, suppliers, staff, management, directors and owners of Westnet for their support, appreciation and dedication to service excellence.

Westnet has been recognised as a leader in customer service within the Telecommunications industry several times however we have had a desire to compare our customer service levels against the best in Australia, regardless of industry, and the CSIA’s “Australian Service Excellence Awards” provided that opportunity to us. It was a fantastic feeling to be recognised as one of the best customer service organisations in Australia but it has also provided additional motivation to continue to lift our customer service standards to new levels.

Congratulations and well done to all Westnet staff for this excellent recognition of all the hard work they put into Westnet’s customer service standards on a daily basis.

A project team has been set up to fast track the launch of a new satellite broadband service for Westnet members. The service planned is a two-way satellite service, offering several plan options, and offering download speeds of up to 2Mbps.

The service will allow us to offer a broadband service to households outside of areas served by ADSL enabled exchanges.

A few years ago, Westnet offered a one-way satellite service that proved unreliable and tricky to manage, and the product was discontinued as it really wasn’t doing members justice. We believe the satellite broadband industry has come a long way during the past few years to overcome some of the underlying issues, and we feel it is going to be a great service for members.

Westnet is applying to participate in the DCITA’s Australian Broadband Guarantee (ABG) program, which will provide subsidies to help cover the satellite dish, installation and router costs - so at this time we are working on a launch offer which would include free set up for those eligible under the ABG.

The launch is dependent on Westnet’s application to participate in the Australian Broadband Guarantee. Funding would be available to assist new satellite subscriptions, and subscriptions that have not benefited from similar DCITA funding programs in the past.

We aim to offer 3 plans, with several download quota options. The entry level plan would offer speeds of 512kbps (down speed) and 256kbps (up speed). Pricing is being worked on as we speak, including an option to ‘bundle and save’ with Westnet phone.

Westnet will be working with IPSTAR, the Satellite Broadband wholesaler to deliver the service. Set-up of the service involves the installation of a satellite dish, some cabling and a satellite router at the user’s premises.

We’re working on releasing the service in the coming few months. As more relevant information comes to hand, I’ll post more details.

Plenty to get on with!

Dan Scott
Marketing Manager, Westnet

Satellite Broadband Update

Westnet is actively working towards the release of our two-way Satellite Broadband. We are in our testing phase with Satellite Broadband and are currently experiencing a technical issue which will affect the end-users Broadband experience. As a result, we are working with our supplier to rectify so we can release the service as soon as it satisfies the quality you would expect from a Westnet service.

Westnet will initially launch Satellite Broadband to those who have registered their interest via the Coming Soon page of the Westnet website before releasing through our Sales team and Agent Network. We will provide regular updates as they come to hand.

Westnet has been trialling some traffic prioritisation tools on our network over the past year with very positive results. As a result, we will continue to use the tools on an ongoing basis.

The key purpose of the traffic prioritisation tools is to ensure latency sensitive applications such as online gaming, web browsing, e-mail and VOIP are not negatively impacted by peer to peer applications. The outcome of the trial illustrates traffic prioritisation has produced no noticeable degradation of peer to peer speeds while ensuring applications such as online gaming, web browsing, e-mail and VOIP receive the bandwidth required.

An important point to note is that Westnet has not enforced a fixed limit on the amount of bandwidth available to peer to peer applications. The amount of bandwidth available to peer to peer traffic is dynamically limited only when the bandwidth required to service the other applications exceeds expectations. This ensures peer to peer is only impacted when absolutely necessary to protect the performance of the other applications. Westnet believes this provides members with the best of both worlds; protection of the performance of key applications without any noticeable impact on peer to peer performance.

The trial was conducted in WA, NSW and QLD and Westnet intends to extend the benefits of traffic prioritisation to other states in the future.

Well it’s been a few weeks since I last gave an update on Westnet’s Charity Day donations, so I thought I’d compile the recent ones into the one post.

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For the last year Westnet has been reviewing its News service; looking at ways to improve the customer experience and provide an overall better product. This process has involved the investigation of in-house news software and external News providers.

After careful consideration SuperNews was chosen as the new direction for Westnet News. SuperNews is the leader in Usenet services since 1995, SuperNews delivers unbeatable speed, performance and reliability, along with the most complete, spam-free content. SuperNews will allow Westnet to provide a more reliable and respectable News service to its customers without any extra cost, that is it will remain FREE. SuperNews also allows Westnet to increase its News offerings meaning a Premium based News Service may be available as an Optional Extra in the near future.

I believe this partnership with SuperNews will allows us to provide a much better News service. I appreciate your thoughts and comments regarding this move.