ntl article says:

Dear Cable Forum User

I can hardly believe its February already. It seems no time since we were wishing each other health and happiness as we welcomed in the New Year. I am delighted to report this month that we are starting to see good results relating to our standard of home visits from our field engineers, following new training and development activity.

Last year we conducted a root and branch review of our operating processes in order to identify any areas of weakness when engineers visit a customer’s home. As part of this review our engineers packed up their toolboxes in a drive to fine-tune and improve levels of customer satisfaction. Over 500 engineers completed a mix of training and development programmes.

The new training and development included a new interactive CD-Rom that simulates real situations. Engineers were given the opportunity to select the options as to what route they would take to manage the situation and actors were used to emulate real situations such as explaining a technical problem in plain English.

Other initiatives included a new National Service Handbook, which now acts as the engineers’ encyclopedia of best practice on how to repair faults in the home. The handbook was supported by an online interactive tutorial and examination. Engineers also undertook additional training that looked specifically at behaviours and customer relationship skills.

We have invested heavily in this programme and in a recent survey overall satisfaction among customers surveyed who had an engineer visit their home shows over 90% were satisfied with the engineer’s visit.

Our field engineers are critical to our overall success as they are our ambassadors when they call at a customer’s home. Engineers working in the field can often feel isolated so following our review we not only invested in a mix of ground breaking blended training we also focused our management operations in order that managers can now spend more than 50% of their time out supporting our field engineers. We will continue to be focused on improving this further.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for giving us your views and opinions on our draft Customer Charter. We will be combining these thoughts with those from our staff and I will write again to let you know of our progress.

Keep warm meantime!

Peter Wilcock
Managing Director
Customer Operations
ntl