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Collating complaints against IBB.
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Looks like this thread is starting to get noticed and is hurting them!!
Apparently they have made "Big Changes" :rolleyes: I plucked this article from yesterdays Sunday Business Post.The Sunday Business Post wrote:
Punter power gets results
Irish Broadband has been forced to improve its service, writes Adrian Weckler
What do you do when you have hundreds of angry customers who are being left on hold? What happens when those customers start posting irate messages on online discussion chatboards and weblogs? Christina Byrne knows all about it.
"I was getting phone calls on my mobile at 10 o'clock at night," said Byrne, director of customer service at Irish Broadband. "People were posting my number on the web and encouraging others to call it." When she was appointed director of customer service at Irish Broadband in January, Byrne placed herself in the firing line of a particularly angry mob of disillusioned punters. These people, unable to take part in the broadband 'revolution' due to lack of access from Eircom, had pinned their hopes on wireless broadband with the small Sandyford based company. But there were teething problems. Before long, many punters were in a rage, faced with a customer service culture which, according to Byrne, was "crap". "People weren't having their calls returned," she said. "We had 20 people on hold at any one time. We had a backlog of 3,000 e-mails that hadn't been dealt with. We were understaffed and not organised properly."
The scale of the problems facing Irish Broadband was very public. Two whole pages of customer service complaints were dedicated to the company on the popular technology messaging portal, Boards.ie. The company was facing a major threat to its reputation as a broadband provider. "The problem was that we had mad growth," said Byrne. "We were trying to do everything at the same time and not hiring enough people." The result was an endless stream of fighting fires and dealing with angry punters who weren't being adequately informed about their problems.
"We thought we were all set up but we underestimated the capacity required," said Byrne. "Today we have 28,000 customers. But last October alone we got almost 7,000 new customers."
Byrne was a veteran of call centres in Esat BT - now British Telecom Ireland - and companies in Canada. "The first thing we did was to set up the call centre so that staff were re-trained and multi-skilled," she said. "We also hired more staff there was a mad rush around that. Then we handled the backlog of e-mails. In December, that stood at about 3,000. Now we answer all e-mails in the same day."
Customer support employees are in no doubt as to the importance of doing things better than before, said Byrne. Some have been disciplined for falling short of the mark. "In retraining our staff, one of the things that we did was to allow them to see more information about the company,'' said Byrne. "That way, they have a better view of things." Byrne's message appears to be that the company has got its act together.
"Comparing then [2005] with now is like the difference between day and night," she said. Nevertheless, Irish Broadband still has some issues that it's dealing with. One of these is how to manage a broadband network with the increase in the number of heavy downloaders. Such people use their broadband connection constantly, to download very large files such as films or masses of music. Although it's usually only one or two people per area, it can have a knock-on effect on other users in the catchment area, reflected in slower broadband speeds.
"There's one area where one individual has caused us to limit the number of subscribers to 45 because of his bandwidth usage, whereas the norm is 75 to 100."
This is being rectified, said Byrne, through the use of special bandwidth management technology at the firm's Sandyford base. The result is that it has not had to throw heavy ' users off its network.
"I don't know of any customer that we've written to because we have people managing it," she said. "We just manage their traffic down. Generally, it's not a problem for us."
A related issue is the network itself. With such a heavy rise in subscribers, is it 'maxed out?
"A number of areas are maxed, but that doesn't affect the quality or speeds of customers' broadband," said Byrne. "Nevertheless, just to be sure, we're currently grooming the number of customers from a maximum of 100 in a given area to a maximum of 75 as a built-in cushion."
Irish Broadband has yet to reach the customer service level that it's aiming for, said Byrne. It still gets 4,500 calls a day, with between 25 and 30 per cent relating to problems. "Are we completely there yet? Maybe not," she said. "But our average for missing calls is now just 8 per cent, below the industry average of 10 per cent. We're expanding the network massively this year and expect to have 75,000 customers by the end of 2006."
The company looks set to launch a datacard broadband product shortly, based on its Ripwave brand. This will put it in direct competition with mobile operators Vodafone and O2, which also have similar datacard broadband plans for this year.
Irish Broadband is also scheduled for flotation, according to its owner, National Toll Roads. This will most likely occur on the London based Alternative Investment Market.
For now, though, Byrne is concentrating on the company's ongoing customer service rehabilitation. ”Our service was crap but we've turned it around in the last couple of months," she said. "'We've a young, dynamic workforce and now offer a great service."
Miss Wonder Woman herself
Although I am not an IBB customer, (and wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot Bargepole) I am appalled by the way they are treating their customer, I guess they are trying to look good now and trying to save face as NTR are flogging them onto the stock market soon in a IPO, Considering the company is losing money and has the reputation of a STD ridden Prostitute, I predict that unless they get their act together properly they will be in serious trouble and may go bankrupt.
They are a bunch of muppets really, I saw an article here about how Digiweb "are one well run ISP" all Digiweb has to do is move in to IBB territory and they will have the majority of customer brought over in jig time. I myself am involved in a County Group Scheme and have stipulated that IBB be under no circumstances allowed to be the provider when & if it comes through.
Keep turning the screws on them fella's eventually they will buckle.0 -
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netwhizkid wrote:Looks like this thread is starting to get noticed and is hurting them!! Apparently they have made "Big Changes" :rolleyes: I plucked this article from yesterdays Sunday Business Post.
Miss Wonder Woman herself Although I am not an IBB customer, (and wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot Bargepole) I am appalled by the way they are treating their customer, I guess they are trying to look good now and trying to save face as NTR are flogging them onto the stock market soon in a IPO, Considering the company is losing money and has the reputation of a STD ridden Prostitute, I predict that unless they get their act together properly they will be in serious trouble and may go bankrupt.
They are a bunch of muppets really, I saw an article here about how Digiweb "are one well run ISP" all Digiweb has to do is move in to IBB territory and they will have the majority of customer brought over in jig time. I myself am involved in a County Group Scheme and have stipulated that IBB be under no circumstances allowed to be the provider when & if it comes through.
Keep turning the screws on them fella's eventually they will buckle.
i thought IBB "didn't QOS or traffic shape" its customers and doesnt distinguish between business and residential users (i though the only differnence was the SLA. if thats the case did she just admit to QOS'ing IBB's heavier users? and from teh sounds of it without even informing or warning the users.0 -
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No. You're wrong. It's IBB's fault.Rattlehead_ie wrote:It may not be the company handing out the same IP twice. Seeing as all Breeze customers get a static IP address its plausable that someone put in the ip address wrong OR just said well Ill try this one 83.xx.xx.xx and it caused an IP conflict! is that not so? 0 -
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