I agree BS, the sets of figures do indeed show something promising happening - and I'm absolutely sure it all works out to have some bearing with the number of people that have been added into the workforce recently.
But there is always a niggle about those statistics, and they bear back to a point your CEO made on his start of the job - that some of the end-users have an absolutely terrible experience: "there is a possibility of leaving the customer in some real distress" - and he wants to fix the way the end-user ultimately interacts with Openreach. It seems that hitting statistical targets isn't enough to give customers a good experience. Perhaps the statistics being measured aren't actually appropriate for the customer? The end-user customer, that is.
Doing well "by the statistics" is, unfortunately, a particular bug-bear of mine...
A year ago (long before I actually had my provisioning problems), I watched the Ofcom consultation on the fixed-access quality of service issues, particularly with regard to what they called "the tail" of deliveries that have gone beyond SLA. Ofcom wanted to make sure these late deliveries weren't de-prioritised as a manner of "gaming" the system.
Their solution was to add another set of statistical KPIs to measure the backlog ... see section 3.126 of
this PDF ... a solution I felt was instantly vulnerable to gaming, by the "inadvertant" cancellation of orders that weren't to their liking, or killing off faults as "not a fault" too readily. A cancelled order is no longer beyond the SLA...
I tend to believe that, with these delayed issues, the problem (from the customer perspective) stops being so much about the amount of time the issue takes, and starts to become about the number of times the issue has gone back-and-forth; for example, the number of engineer appointments an issue has taken, or the number of times calls must be placed back through an ISP support desk. Every new contact requires re-explanation of the issue, raising frustration levels. Every time an appointment goes wrong, the user has to play chinese whispers with the ISP - usually involving members of staff who have never heard of the issue or you. A lack of continuity becomes a big part of the problem - exacerbated by the Openreach insistence on staying uninvolved with the end-user.
Those customers "in real distress" are there, not just because of the delay, but because of the number of poor-quality interactions they are forced to have during that period.
I always felt that the best solution was to add a target that required Openreach to minimise the number of appointments needed. Perhaps something to recognise that customers use up precious resources (days on holiday from work) to wait in for an engineer.
Sad, then, that I created such an excellent case-study here - demonstrating that the order system itself isn't a fit point to be measuring statistics from - for at least the tail - and demonstrating how the poor-quality interactions build that ultimate frustration.
It's great that, in the "big picture", things are working out well. But from Joe's comments when he started, I'm expecting him to pay attention to the little picture too - the people for whom the "big picture" statistics aren't working. I'd love to see him cover that aspect in his announcements too.
