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.