Tag: service

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Archived Business

What’s in an award? Timico is 3x finalist in ISPAs

Earlier this year I spent an appreciable chunk of my life filling out awards entries. Three of them were for the ISPAs. Google it. These awards entries have pretty strict entry criteria and very fixed number of words that you are allowed to use. Not nearly enough space to adequately cover how great you are at what you do.

However you have to put yourself in the position of the judges, whoever they are. They don’t want to have to plough through several editions of War and Peace (Tolstoy) when they are giving of their time free and gratis. So it takes ages to condense War and Peace into 500 words or whatever the number was (war was waged, someone won).

Anyway the upshot is that of the three categories entered by Timico we made it to the shortlist for all three: Managed Service Innovation, Customer Service and VoIP, as I recall. Yay.

This is great news because we are up against a lot of other great companies with great services (what a great novel War and Peace was). Great.

Companies enter these awards because if you win it means you have bragging rights and can show off to customers and prospects and hopefully turn the prospects into new customers. I think you know what I’m talking about. So I’m reasonably chuffed to make it to all three shortlists.

Details here. Wish us luck on the 11th July. If you’re going come and say hello.

Ciao.

Categories
Engineer internet

The history of the Isle of Man Postal service by Kelly from the Isle of Man

Mail of MannJust reading “The Mail of Mann” – the story of postal services in the Isle of Man written by Robert Kelly. A fascinating read  if you like that sort of thing which I presumably do.

On September 3rd 1837 the Post Office in the UK despatched a surveyor to the island to assess what might be done to improve its postal communications. The transmission of data packets (ie letters) was very much adhoc, asynchronous if you like. In particular the service to outlying rural parts of the island was pretty hit and miss.

Unfortunately for those rural dwellers, which in particular included the Lord Bishop whose residence as you probably know is on the far side of the island between Kirk Michael and Ballaugh, the surveyor decided that it would be too expensive to set up a regular service to anywhere other than the main towns which would in any case cover most of the people sending and receiving mail.

The rural areas were left to people to sort out themselves. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Categories
End User nuisance calls and messages

Telephone Preference Service

I’m getting a lot of traffic for the post on the Telephone Preference Service. It’s no surprise. If your house is anything like ours we get scam calls on a daily basis. Someone needs to do something about it.

We have varying strategies for dealing with the scammers in our house. These range from keeping them hanging on for 10 – 15 minutes to just swearing at them and telling them to “go away”.

I favour the latter but the choice is yours.

Categories
Business fun stuff

Listening to the voice of the customer

Timico lives or dies by the quality of the service it provides its customers. The continuous improvement to the service levels is something built in to framework of the business.

 

Monday morning is “Voice of The Customer” morning where complaints and feedback from customers received during the previous week are looked at by senior management.

 

You might argue that a business with its house in order should not receive any complaints. However with somewhere in the region of 10,000 businesses entrusting the care of their communications to us there is potentially always going to be someone with a problem – typically “my phone line hasn’t been working for three days” or “something has gone wrong with my broadband”but it can be more serious.

 

We look at whether there could have been a better way to service the customer with the problem or whether there is an improvement that could be made to our process. If necessary a director level member of staff will own the communications back to that customer.

 

In fact the contact details of each Timico board member are available on the website so that customers can reach senior people directly if they believe that the system has let them down for any reason.

 

Happily there are weeks where no specific complaints have been received and the occasion is used to talk about general ways of improving the service.