Customer Experience Bod

Hussain Bolt

2012-01-18T21:01:00.005Z

Chances are many people have seen our new TV advertising with Olympic athlete and world's fastest man Usain Bolt that debuted at the weekend to support the speed doubling programme we announced last week, which I've been working on for some time and am very excited by:
To support the advertising we also have cardboard cutouts of the man himself popping up around our offices, and from the one in our head office in Hook he seems to also like his TiVo:
One of the funniest things I have seen for some time though is an e-mail that went out from our local charity champions in the same office:
You might want to click on it for a larger version, but I've also zoomed in on the key part of the note that has caused much mirth:
At a guess it's probably safe to assume that whoever wrote that note wasn't in the ballot for 100m finals day tickets at London 2012!

Fernando Torres - any advance on a fiver?

2011-12-12T20:01:00.005Z

I was in Kingston (upon-Thames that is, not Jamaica) on Saturday and I wandered past the Chelsea FC shop, where this very much amused me:I know he's been a great signing ... for Liverpool ... but surely he's worth a bit more than a fiver?

@virginmedia - 100k strong and growing!

2011-12-02T15:07:00.003Z

Our social media customer care team have come a long way since December 2008 when I posted the first tweet from @virginmedia (or at least I did once we got the name off the user at the time!) ... in fact so far that they've just posted their 100,000th tweet:We're also on the cusp of 30k followers on Twitter (and we're also on Facebook) so why not give the team a follow and shout out if they can help at all?

Great work to Billy, Pete M, Sam, Michael, Pete S, Kyle, Ian, Dan, Sue and Shaun ... and for all the new joiners about to come on board and help us make it even better :)

George from the Bank

2011-11-25T14:36:00.003Z

Spotify put a brilliant thing up on their Twitter feed today - a playlist mocking Nigerian scammers that they came up with based on song titles.

I thought I'd have a go at it myself, given how much of a Spotify addict I am, with my own tribute to Fonejacker's funniest character:The fact that it starts off with the cheesiest video of all time just adds to it for me. I even got an artist in there called 'Scam Artist'. Beat that!

Best Halloween costume ever!

2011-11-13T20:52:00.002Z

I loved this when I was sent it last week:Whilst I loved the drive thru, the bit at the petrol station is the funniest part of it. It does go on a bit though ...

Tonight's QI

2011-11-04T10:21:00.001Z

Here is a clip from tonight's episode of QI, which I saw being filmed earlier in the year:
I'll be avoiding it tonight and watching the 'XL' version tomorrow night, but no doubt people will let me know in the meantime if they spot me in the audience.

It was an excellent night and I really enjoyed it. I wonder how many times the phrase 'Michael Winner' makes the final cut though ...?

If Carlsberg made Sundays …

2011-10-24T12:35:00.004+01:00

24 years of hurt. It's like how Manchester United fans felt when they first won the Premier League. More on them later though.

Yesterday was pretty much as good as it gets for a proud Kiwi who is also a Liverpool fan and likes comedy, so I thought I'd share it and see if anyone else can beat it for a day.

I was up bright and early, fished out my All Black jersey and was glued to the sofa to watch us play the French in the World Cup final.

I’ve never been the world's biggest rugby fan but 15 years away from New Zealand has certainly made me more interested in how the All Blacks do as a proud Kiwi and I was even finding myself singing along to the words of the dreary dirge that is our national anthem God Defend New Zealand (not the Maori words though, sadly we were never taught those when I was at school) and cheered a particularly good All Black Haka – although I was disappointed that the ABs didn't do the iconic Ka Mate.

There followed 80 minutes of nerves as we were – frankly – out-played by the French and every Australian I know started texting and tweeting me messages about choking (naturally I usually retort when this happens with an Ashes-related jibe or mention the underarm incident – incidentally a distant relative of my Mum's was the batsman who faced it), but as the best team in the tournament and the only unbeaten one we definitely deserved to win. The hall carpet's a bit worn today though!

As Sean Fitzpatrick always says 35 times in every sentence on TV, all credit to the lads. Skippered by Richie McCaw they finally ended our hoodoo:

[Image from Getty Images / The Guardian - hope they don't mind me using it!]

Speaking of the TV coverage, wasn't the commentary awful? (in my own personal opinion of course!) It was summed up in the final for me when the ITV commentator said that McCaw was "the closest thing to royalty in New Zealand". Apart from the Queen (as head of state). Oh, and the Maori King of course. What nonsense!

Have heard plenty of stories of partying from friends and family, which is quite impressive given that the country shuts down at 8pm daily and the game didn’t finish until almost 11pm on a Sunday night.

But the day just got better. Liverpool played really well on Saturday so I was disappointed with a draw even if I did have Craig Bellamy as first goal scorer, but Sunday's football was as good as it gets.

I sat down in front of the TV to watch the Manchester Derby once my nerves had recovered from the rugby, and accordingly spent most of the next 90 minutes laughing heartily at the screen as Manchester United had a player sent off and shipped 6 goals to City at home, who you'd have to fancy to win the league now.

Even funnier than the United fans emptying the ground before the game was over (to be fair it's a long way back to Bournemouth and Bangkok on a Sunday afternoon) was the look on Gary Neville's face on TV afterwards:

[Image from Twitter user @PascalZidane]

Genius! Can't think of a more deserving man.

Chelsea having 2 players sent off and losing at QPR added to the comedy factor that could only have been bettered if Fernando Torres was one of them.

Once that was over it was time to head into town, meet my oldest mate Russ for a brilliant curry and then off to see Reginald D Hunter live at standup comedy, and he was really very, very funny indeed.

Can you beat that for a day?

Air New Zealand's marketing genius

2011-10-23T15:37:00.005+01:00

Well we did it! France were definitely the best team in the final but somehow New Zealand won the World Cup in Auckland this morning, which is fair enough to the best team in the tournament - as we clearly were.

Given that the game finished just before 11pm on a Sunday night New Zealand time, hopefully the national tradition of the 8pm shutdown didn't happen and people could get out to celebrate all over the country!

I was very impressed by a cunning piece of marketing (which was clearly pre-prepared) that I had sent to me less than an hour after the final whistle by Air New Zealand (I'm on their mailing list having previously flown with them):Very clever indeed, Air NZ! It's not the first time they've jumped on the rugby bandwaggon though ...

My kind of wordcloud

2011-10-14T16:59:00.005+01:00

Some people seem to think that wordclouds are becoming a bit passé, but personally I still like them and think they're a great way of displaying a lot of text in an easily digestible way that pulls the trends about what the text contains really well.

I was reviewing some recent (from the last few weeks) feedback from customers yesterday about our Digital Home Support service (more info on that here) which goes down really well with our customers that take advantage of it, and I thought I'd share the feedback of several hundred of them summarised as per below:
It certainly brightened up my day :)

Beer or kebab? How about both?

2011-10-11T21:30:00.003+01:00

I actually like lots of things about working for a Virgin company, and yes I'll freely admit I'm biased.

One of the things I do appreciate is the challenging convention, doing things differently and not taking ourselves too seriously - hence I laughed when a colleague sent on this image this afternoon of some of the regional advertising we've done in Southampton to support the area's cable network expansion:Click on it for a larger image ... I'm sure it will make you smile. Very amusing indeed :)

The social media strategy tool

2011-09-09T12:55:00.002+01:00

I loved this site I was sent the link to overnight:

What the **** is my social media strategy?

Apart from the rude words (apologies for those) there's some genius efforts that I must try and put into a PowerPoint deck one day to see if anyone spots them :)

Watch out, Spider!

2011-08-12T14:12:00.001+01:00

There’s a very funny thread happening over on our forums at present – with this being a moment of comedy genius from a customer:

"... when I held the reset button it didn't go back to factory settings, I even was face to face with a huge spider when I had to press the reset button and I should claim compensation because it scared the hell outa me."

Maybe we should send him a free video on demand movie of Spiderman :)

Just thought I’d share. Have a great weekend!

A new environment for the tweam

2011-08-02T17:40:00.003+01:00

I'm still settling back in post a trip to Australia and New Zealand (which was great), but it's clear while I've been away that things have been busy with our social media customer service team (or 'tweam' as we call them, a hangover from the day when they were known as the 'Twitter Tweam') moving into a new area in our Manchester offices and I think it looks just great (and can't wait to visit again soon):

We've grown the team this year as we've taken on Facebook (well, only in that we're now offering customer service via it - we're not challenging them or anything) and more people engage with us online, so I hope the new environment is going down well with Kyle, Mike, Billy, the 2 Petes, Ian, Sam, Sue and Dan and I'll see you soon guys!

As each visit costs me a box of donuts I have to save up :)

You can find us on Twitter @virginmedia and on Facebook at facebook.com/virginmedia.

Sydney Monorail

2011-06-24T07:35:00.003+01:00

I'm in Sydney on leave after attending a conference and was highly amused to see the Simpsons-like Monorail, which I can tell from speaking to the locals they're not overly keen on.

I thought I'd upload a video of it ...

... and when I went on a lap of it there was a load of purple velour wearing people there too, which just added to the kitschness of it!

Virgin Media Digital Customer Care

2011-06-13T17:37:00.003+01:00

Find attached a Slideshare of presentation I am doing next week for the Web 3.0 and The Future of Social Media conference about the Virgin Media story in terms of Digital Customer Care - what we've learnt and our future:

I look forward to the event!

Facebook tattoo a hoax

2011-06-12T15:01:00.005+01:00

Oh, looks like I've been victim to a good publicity stunt ... well at least I'm not the only one ...
More detail here. I wonder if someone will be going out and doing it for real now though?

The social media tattoo

2011-06-08T16:56:00.004+01:00

I'm a bit of a fan of tattoos - I have a few myself - and I'm also a big fan of social media.

However, I'm not sure I'd go as far as this in having my Facebook friends tattooed on me:

As my cousin rightly asked herself (on Facebook naturally), what do you do when you want to cull someone? The other question is obvious though as to what to do when someone changes their profile pic ... you hack into their account and change it back!*

* Not really, of course

Update 12/06 - It's a hoax!

Link this up to your Facebook account

2011-06-01T16:52:00.002+01:00

I got sent a brilliant link today to one of the best social media things I have seen for some time, Intel's Museum of Me application, which links into your Facebook account (with your permission of course):I'd highly recommend giving it a go - and it's worth doing so with full sound, I was just blown away myself.

Wired UK review of our Twitter 'Tweam'

2011-04-30T12:43:00.003+01:00

Some really good news about our great Twitter 'Tweam' at @virginmedia.

In the WiredUK podcast from April 21 (approx 16 minutes in) the site's editor (and a Virgin Media customer) Nate Lanxon gives our guys a really good review about a response to his enquiry being received within 20 minutes of him posing a query.

Nate also thinks that this is what all companies should do. I'll admit to being biased but I do agree!

The podcast can be found here and thanks for taking the time to feed that back Nate :-)

Shiver me Timbers

2011-04-16T11:48:00.004+01:00

As part of the day job I get to read a lot of comments from customers - and have developed a keen eye for the natural comedians that brighten up my day when I come across their feedback.

One of the best recent examples of a humorous interaction was the exchange I saw this week between a customer and Billy from our Twitter 'Tweam':

Customer:

Ahoy

My landline is down and my iphone is being repaired, no one else in the house til tonight so I can't make any calls

please help!

Billy:

Good day Me Heartie,

Looking into your telephone issue it isn't something that's affecting your area, so we're going to have to look a bit deeper. Could I ask if you've tried using a telephone? If you haven't is there anyway you could give that a whirl, I don't want to be wasting your time with a technician visit if it's not needed.

Look forward to hearing you soon cap'n =)

Customer:

Yo Ho Billy, I hoisted up a sail on the ARRRRRRRRR virgin media support forum, so I did, so I did.

A buccaneer by the name of Ray has signaled a privateer to come aboard on the 6th day, heres hoping he fixes me magic talky box.

YAR

Not only was the whole exchange very funny, Billy from the 'Tweam' and Ray from the forum team did a great job to resolve the problem and we have a happy customer!

On that note, I'm off to Ticketmaster to buy a pair of tickets for Billy's standup debut.

Beautiful British Name

2011-04-07T12:11:00.003+01:00

I’ve been on a bit of a comedy binge (insert gag here of your choice about my career) over the last year or so, having seen Frankie Boyle, Dara O’Briain, Russell Brand and Al Murray live amongst others, and really enjoyed most of them (although I was disappointed by Frankie, who had very little fresh material).

A couple of weekends ago I had a total comedy binge, seeing John Bishop in Bournemouth on the Saturday and Al Murray (again) on the Sunday in a really compact venue at the Hammersmith Lyric in London.

What a cracking weekend it was!

Despite the venue being a bit odd (it’s usually a conference centre) and the staff being over attentive with their continuous announcements over the PA system in Bournemouth it was a really enjoyable night.

The best bit was the hecklers, who tended to be from the Liverpool or Manchester area and he dealt with them really well. I thought one of the put downs he used was hilarious:

John: Where are you from?
Heckler: Wythenshawe!
John: Wythenshawe? It’s like what it would be if the cast of ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ settled down somewhere!

Not very politically correct, but very funny!

Sunday was Al Murray, headlining an event that had a few other comedians. Al, as you may know, is legendary for picking on people in the audience – and thankfully we were safe as we were in row G. Phew!

Or so I thought. The front row was row F. Here’s how far away Al wasn’t:

Now I’m aware I’m a reasonably conspicuous person (and wearing a T-Shirt that just said ‘pancakes’ on it doesn’t help much), so we started preparing our stories for when he asked us what we do.

Al: What do you do Alex?
Me: I work for Richard Branson.
Al: What do you do, do you blow up the balloons?
*Much laughter*
Me: I work in customer experience for Virgin Media
Al: Any Virgin customers here, anyone got any problems? Alex can sort them out for you!

Well, that was nice of him wasn’t it? Thankfully the responses were amusing and just to wind me up, as I didn’t have any business cards on me!

Of the three of us only one other got picked on, with her saying she was an “office manager” … which Al summarised as being “oh, you’re a cleaner then aren’t you?”

It was another really good night and a great weekend of comedy, and I even got a tweet back from Al when I said I’d enjoyed having the mickey taken out of me!

Being in a much smaller venue that was a lot more intimate than when I last saw him (at the Hammersmith Apollo) really made it a much more enjoyable night with the Pub Landlord – not that it wasn’t great first time!

I’ve now seen enough comedians live that I thought it was time I ranked them on the basis of enjoyment and how much I laughed:

Al Murray
John Bishop
Dara O’Briain
Billy Connolly
Russell Brand
Frankie Boyle

Who’s the best you’ve seen in the flesh?

The Twen Commandments

2011-04-03T19:27:00.002+01:00

I've been pondering recently the things on Twitter that wind me up, but, more importantly, what works well in use of it as a medium and I thought I'd share my 'rules of Twitter' or my Twen Commandments if you like - as I tweeted them earlier today.

Anyone using deckly or similar such services breaks the spirit of Twitter and will get unfollowed!
Any applications that tweet 'as' you (or DM you unsolicitedly) without your knowledge are evil.
Don't RT any feeds that ask you to do to win something. You taint their brand and make you look like a spammer.
Never beg for followers. It makes you look like a sad act.
'Celebs' who don't engage with their followers by replying to them are vacuous and should be ignored/unfollowed.
Any brand not on there and not responding to tweets both to and about them doesn't care and has no clue.
Be patient with newbies. They keep it fresh and relevant as a medium and drive innovation.
'Humorous' news related parody feeds that live for anything more than 4 weeks is flogging a dead horse.
People who only ever tweet when they are trying to promote something (PR etc) must be unfollowed immediately.
Finish lists like this when the material naturally ends, rather than rounding it up to a landmark number.

Had to add the last one as a homage to social media 'news' sites that endless post dull lists of even duller things (am sure many will know who I mean!) but thought I'd share generally.

My personal opinion and all that of course ...

Michael Jackson statue

2011-04-03T13:08:00.003+01:00

I turned down a ticket to see Fulham v Blackpool at Craven Cottage today - and in doing so I've missed the best thing ever, the Michael Jackson statue unveiled by Mohammed Fayed.

Picture credit from Twitter user @zulfikaralex

See some more pictures of it here on the Mirror website - you must have a look!

Fayed saying that anyone who doesn't like it can "go to hell" is a bit harsh though and I thought his comments were off the wall.

The match itself is set to be a thriller.

OK, I'll stop now.

Got to love our customers!

2011-03-22T11:30:00.000Z

As part of the day job recently I've been reading lots of comments customers give us, and I particularly enjoyed a gem a colleague came across this morning:

It was refreshing when I got a call from your customer services recommending I would benefit by changing my phone package to free anytime calls, (My WIFE doesn't understand "Off peak" or "Keep it brief"). Good job she’s gorgeous. Anyway, looks like my bill next month will be smaller. Thanks.

That made me laugh out loud heartily. Good work!

Thirty years of revenge

2011-03-16T14:44:00.003Z

This month marks 30 years since the personal computing revolution really kicked off with the launch of this computer, the ZX81:
Some would say it's a sign of old age that I remember it well (I would counter this with the fact that it is still only 1987 in New Zealand, where I am from!), and more so when my best friend got one of its successors, the Spectrum.

Software was stored on audio cassettes and hence you got to hear lots of machine noises when you loaded a game, much the same as you also heard when using dial-up Internet access – which we got a bit later after my brother got a Commodore 64 for (I presume) his birthday one year:Software was also loaded on cassettes, and these were the days when computer magazines published all the code to games – I well remember Jason (my brother) and I doing shifts around the clock to type games in, and of one game in particular that we were very excited by at the time called Richthofen's Revenge (that you can still play in a C64 emulator here).There always seemed to be typos in the magazines and you had to wait the next month's issue of it for the corrections so that you could actually complete and play the game – which was a very frustrating wait for the Brown sons who were very keen to have a go in the meantime!

Interestingly some of these retro machines are now worth a fortune to collectors on the likes of eBay. Our Commodore 64 was last seen acting as a door stop to the hall cupboard and being chewed on by our dog at the time.

And it was the last time I wrote decent software!

Twitter customer service podcast

2011-03-13T15:06:00.002Z

I recorded a podcast a couple of weeks ago largely about our experience with customer service on Twitter with Callum from Stopgap Marketing that I thought I'd provide a link to if anyone is interested in a listen. It can be found here.

That Mitchell Johnson, his sledging is *****

2011-02-26T09:05:00.003Z

One of the funniest things from the Ashes series win was the Mitchell Johnson song that the Barmy Army came up with, which goes something like this:

He bowls it to the left,
He bowls it to the r-i-i-i-i-ight,
That Mitchell Johnson,
His bowling is *****

Am sure you can guess what the word starred out it is, it rhymes.

His sledging is no better given by this YouTube video sent to me by a colleague yesterday:
Funny!

Quake 2011

2011-02-24T21:41:00.003Z

For all of us Kiwis it's been a shocking week, when 102 (so far) people have been confirmed as having been killed in the Christchurch earthquake, and so many places that I know so well have been destroyed (as I've seen on TV).

Having heard of people close to those I know being killed, I've been relieved that nobody I know of has been anything other than spooked (including friends and family of the Kiwis I work with), although from catching up with my folks it does sound like some family have had very serious property damage.

My best friend growing up Bernie posted some shocking pictures of the previous 'quake in Christchurch and has put up a blog of his experience this week. I'm just glad both he and his family are OK, and am thinking of those who have not been so lucky. Hopefully I'll get a chance to catch up with him when I'm back in New Zealand later this year.

My thoughts and best wishes are with everyone affected.

Mystery Twopping

2011-02-16T14:27:00.002Z

I'm a great believer that one of the best ways to find out how you are as a business in your customer's eyes is to experience it as a customer yourself, via the mechanism of mystery shopping. I did a whole bunch of it a while back to check out how our TV packages were being explained to new customers (good results by the way), and have been involved in another example of it over the last couple of weeks.

Previously (well, a number of times) I've mentioned our brilliant Twitter 'Tweam' – Michael, Billy, Sam & Pete – who are based out of Manchester and help out customers reporting problems via Twitter both reactively (those talking 'to' Virgin Media) and proactively (those talking 'about' us – but not to us direct), resolving any problems they have and delivering a brilliant customer experience.

I could blog some great examples all day, but below is just one comment from a really appreciative customer recently:A month or so ago a customer Tweeted about (i.e. not to us direct) Virgin Media on Twitter, reporting she had a problem that she'd had trouble resolving. Sam from the 'Tweam' stepped in and picked it up, got on the case and fed back to the internal IVR team some ideas on service improvements as a result of it – as well as keeping the customer up to date every step of the way.

What she didn’t know was who the customer was – the Chief Marketing Officer of Satmetrix, the company we set up our Net Promoter® programme with.

I had a contact from her (Deb Eastman) subsequently (you can follow her on Twitter here if you're interested) about her experience, and it's true to say she was very impressed. Not only did she tell me in some depth how good the experience was, she also asked a whole bunch of questions so she could tell everyone attending their annual NPS conference in Miami a few weeks ago :)

If you're interested you can find more detail on what was said via the conference blog of one of the delegates and also from Deb's blog – but either way it's great recognition for one of the many fabulous teams we have internally and well done guys.

And no, this isn't an attempt to get out of buying the donuts I've promised to get for the 'Tweam' next time I'm up to see them!

Superhub Update

2011-02-14T15:32:00.003Z

There have been many comments to the blog I put up last year about our new Superhub devices, which customers on higher broadband speeds are now installed with - the devices being a 'gateway' that replaces the separate modems and routers from before with a single device.

One of the most common feature requests has been for the ability to use the Superhub as just a modem and for customers to be able to use their own router for those who wish to. This is known as 'bridge' mode, and there is an update on how we are getting on with this (along with some trial details) here.

We have also setup another thread on the help & support forums to capture any other ideas for future Superhub development. This can be found here, and we'd appreciate any ideas and thoughts being submitted to this that thread so we can keep them all in one place.

How to speak New Zillund

2011-02-11T12:24:00.002Z

I'm chuckling away at this in the office today (click on image for a larger version):Blimey - do I really sound like that?

Truly the King

2011-01-24T19:57:00.001Z

Loved the effort from Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish in his press conference this morning in taking the mickey out of the Sky reporter after the sexism story of the last few days:
Still the King!

3-1

2011-01-07T13:19:00.004Z

What do you call an Australian with a century?
A bowler.

I’ve always loved cricket since my Dad took me to the Basin Reserve (the world’s biggest traffic island) in Wellington to see NZ play England in 1984, and as a proud Kiwi I support two teams, as this T-Shirt puts it so well:So it’s no surprise who I’ve been supporting in the long nights I’ve sat up over the last few weeks watching the Aussies take beating after beating in the Ashes, laughing heartily at Ricky Ponting’s antics (almost as much as I did at his dismissals) and cheering England on all the way through.

What has been as funny is to see the reaction of the (normally – see a particularly poorly judged recent example here) crowing Australian press:Couldn’t happen to a nicer country eh?

England played so well and really gave the Aussies a kicking most of the way through (well other than at Perth and for a day at Brisbane) on their own turf, and were so entertaining to watch along the way – in the end it was a great way to use up the remainder of my leave from last year.

I expect I might have lost a few Twitter followers though over the month of December, as maybe I did go on about it a little bit:Either way I can’t wait for the next series in 2013, which seems like too far away already – although 2.5 years of winding up Aussies will no doubt fly by.

Bring on the world cup … oh, and the NZ vs Pakistan series which started last night. There goes another weekend of trying to sort out the body clock!

The Digital Nativity

2010-12-21T12:51:00.001Z

I thought this was really well put together and worth a watch:

I hope everyone has a happy and safe festive season!

Twitter humour

2010-12-18T11:17:00.002Z

It's slightly rude (and brings out the child in me) but this made me laugh on Twitter yesterday:I guess whatever floats your boat - and a happy Christmas to you too sir!

Stuart Baggs (The Robbed)

2010-12-16T00:19:00.003Z

As I've said previously I love The Apprentice, and I have particularly enjoyed this year's pseudo-panto candidate Stuart Baggs - who has been great value throughout.

This week marked the interview stage, and my has 'our' Stuart been hard done by out of it as ~~Alan Sir Alan~~ Lord Sugar makes up for his obvious guilt over the firing of the (very) lovely Liz last week by making Stuart his scapegoat, based on the advice of a totally clueless lackey.

Stuart has a telecoms licence on the Isle of Man you know, one as an ISP. ISP being an abbreviation for 'Internet Service Protocol' you know.

Apart from the fact that ISP actually stands for Internet Service Provider and the argument over his licence (from the lackey) was complete and total nitpicking of the highest order when his company is a triple play provider - and hence offers TV, broadband and phone services.

In my mind that's a telco, regardless of the minutiae of what technology is used to deliver the services, definition-wise (and in the eyes of a regulator) - which is clearly what was used as a justification to sack him by our favourite entrepreneur.

I can't argue with the other sackings, but it should be Stuart up against Stella next week - and winning, as this year reaches it's final duel.

Stella will win at a canter next week. It's almost not even worth watching it, were Stuart not set to return for a guest slot.

Phishing Alert

2010-12-15T12:03:00.004Z

Yesterday we were alerted to one of the more advanced phishing attacks against our customers we have seen, and having received the mail myself I thought I'd share what it looked like:Click on it for a larger version, and note the strapline at the bottom including the e-mail address it was sent to (which I have Photoshopped so I don't get more spam!).

Note: This is not a genuine e-mail to our customers and was not sent by Virgin Media.

As per our standard practice, as soon as we were alerted to the message we put up a warning on our website and blocked the site the link went to from being accessed by our customers until the network team at the other end take it down, and with the site it linked to being a very convincing copy of My Virgin Media (this is a genuine link!) it's clear that phishing attacks are becoming more advanced - even if the message did include some of the characteristic spelling mistakes you usually see in phishing attacks.

My spam e-mail folder is full of attempted phishing attacks and the usual advice is to be wary of a message unless you know it's genuine. Personally I never click on links in e-mails, but go to the website myself instead via typing in the website address manually into a browser window.

Whoosh!

2010-12-09T10:23:00.001Z

With the first places on our network now able to get 100Mb broadband, I thought I'd share a speedtest graph I spotted via Twitter from a customer who recently left their ADSL supplier to join our fibre optic broadband service:I wonder if anyone can guess which day he was installed on 50Mb :-)

Dara Ó Brilliant

2010-12-03T12:07:00.005Z

[Image Credit - Wikipedia]

I've been to three comedy gigs this year (and Tim Minchin at the O2 with full orchestra is yet to come - can't wait for that) - Frankie Boyle (poor and really lacking in new material), Al Murray (really good) and Dara Ó Briain, who was truly excellent and one of the funniest gigs I have ever been to. Would highly recommend to anyone to go if you get a chance to see him live.

He's also been a revelation as the host of 'The Apprentice - You're Fired' since Adrian Chiles went to ITV earlier this year, and he was on great form this week in offering truffles to the fired candidate (no spoilers), some of his one liners and how he interacted with one of the best panels so far on the programme - which has had a new lease of life and I'm enjoying it almost as much as the main show itself.

And I can't wait to see him with Stuart Baggs when 'The Brand' eventually leaves ... that might have to be a four hour long special!

More @ The Apprentice: http://www.bbc.co.uk/apprentice.

BBC drives Baggs traffic

2010-11-29T19:41:00.003Z

I had a look at my blog statistics the other day in Google Analytics, and noted a recent big jump:
Hunting around to see why, I checked out where the traffic had originated from and it's predominantly coming from the BBC Apprentice page which is linking to my Stuart Baggs blog:As one blog poster said, I do hope he makes it as far as the interview stage before he gets fired!

Over egged headline of the year?

2010-11-27T12:42:00.004Z

Having recently blogged the dullest news 'story' ever I was quite taken by the over exaggerated (just a bit!) headline I saw of a local paper in the shop yesterday:Clicking on the image will help you understand more of the scale of this appalling 'massacre'.

Back me up

2010-11-22T10:07:00.003Z

We aim to ensure we are offering our customers the best products and services, and we're aware that VStuff (the backup service we offer) has had its ups and downs. I thought I'd share with you what we’re currently focusing on doing to improve it.

For example you've told us that the software is difficult to use - which we're fixing with a significantly improved look and feel and far simpler interface. The software's reliability and the VStuff online web site also needs attention - and we're improving those too.

So here's what's happening:

2010

In order to upload or download files, V Stuff users connect to a "back-end platform". A number of stability and capacity improvements are being implemented to this platform within the next month.

This will vastly improve the stability of the service along with an increase in transfer speeds when uploading or downloading files from and to your online data store.

Couple this with the upload speed improvements we're currently rolling out and you'll start to see considerable improvements.

2011

The big changes come early next year with the overhaul of the backup software interface and improvements to the website. We've made the changes after listening to feedback from customers and working with them to improve the design – so we're sure you'll find it more intuitive and simple to use.

We're also changing what we call things, updating the core software itself, simplifying some of the more complex options in the software to improve usability and rebranding the service to 'Backup & Storage' (it does what it says on the tin!) but don’t worry, the photo service will still be there.

We were hoping to have all these major improvements released this year but are taking some additional time on testing to ensure we are as confident as we can be that the experience is brilliant and we fix all issues present today.

Here's a taster of what the service will look like, we hope you agree a huge improvement….

We'll be in touch with backup & storage users shortly to let them know when exactly these changes will take place, so please bear with us while we get these improvements rolled out.

Dullest news 'story' ever?

2010-11-21T18:10:00.004Z

I am wondering if this - which I was sent last week - is the dullest 'news' story ever seen, highlighting what local media can be like sometimes?Needless to say I shared it with a friend who works at Amazon immediately!

Also, I don't speak Dutch but even I can work out that this is a rather unfortunate example of advertising placement in a newspaper:

Stuart Baggs (The Brand)

2010-11-19T11:51:00.003Z

"Everything I touch turns to sold" (Episode One)

I love The Apprentice. And by that I don’t mean the US version where you sit there in amazement at Donald Trump's hair and the fact he can go out looking like that every day (the only hair on TV to rival Gerry Francis' appalling mullet on Sky Sports News).

I mean the Alan, sorry, 'Lord' Sugar version of it in the UK – which gets sillier by the episode and this year has been highlighted by Stuart Baggs, a 21-year-old telecoms entrepreneur from the Isle of Man who comes out with ridiculous statements, irritates the hell out of everyone with his arrogance and this week proved to be a team leader so spectacularly bad that even John Barnes would get a management job ahead of him.

He was actually growing on me over the last few weeks when he learnt to keep his mouth shut, but his inability to contain his 'extreme masculinity' along with his badgering his team members left me convinced (as Dara O'Briain said on You're Fired afterwards) that Sugar might actually change the rules and fire him this week – but with his team winning he didn't.

He's got to go next week doesn't he? Who do you think will win by the way? Got to be Liz for me – she's doing really well.

We top 15,000 Twitter followers!

2010-11-04T12:43:00.005Z

Overnight we (@virginmedia) passed the landmark number of 15,000 followers on Twitter going by the 'worm' from Twittercounter:And backed up by our Twitter profile:We generally get anything from 20-60 new followers a day looking to hear news from Virgin Media or seek help from our wonderful Twitter 'Tweam' of Billy, Pete and Sam (more on them here) and the 'jump' last week (250+ new followers in 2 days) was due to the launch of 100Mb and the Gadget Show's Jason Bradbury tweeting about it ... keeping the Tweam busy with many enquiries from both customers and non customers!

As ever the team are here to help and I look forward to our followers continuing to grow :-)

Superhub!

2010-11-03T11:57:00.004Z

A few months back we launched a new 'Gateway' device for customers on our non 50Mb broadband tiers - the device being a combined modem and router from Netgear that we've called the Virgin Media Hub.

And it's gone very well, with a much lower rate of customers contacting us for help with both setting it up and using it on an ongoing basis - as well as improved customer satisfaction scores with additional steps being taken at point of install by our engineers.

Combined with the new broadband activation process coming early in 2011, it's part of a whole programme of works to improve the 'join' experience - as is the 'Gateway' device for the 100Mb service that's coming soon, the 'Superhub'.

The Superhub, which will also replace the separate modem and router as part of 50Mb installs, looks like this and I think you'll agree is a very shiny piece of kit:You should be able to click on any of these for a larger version of them by the way if interested.

The Superhub is 'N' wireless capable, can do speeds of something like 400Mb (so is quite future proof!) and has been through a full product design process including plenty of usability testing with customers (along with all the other testing you would expect us to do) - so as well as looking great hopefully it'll be easy to use.

The usability testing we did enabled us to make some important changes to the stand and the port configuration to improve it, and huge thanks are very much due to all the customers who helped us with ideas on improving it at the usability sessions ... as well as on the upcoming CD activation process which we're all looking forward to having out there next year.

And on that note, I'd best keep an ear on the door as my own beta trial Superhub is due to arrive today I hope!

Update Feb 14, 2011:

Thanks to all those who have commented on the Superhub, and for the feedback on what additional features you would like to see included in a future firmware release for it in particular.

For those who have inquired about 'bridge' mode (which would enable you to use your own router with it), there is an update on our help & support forums here and there is also another thread for any other ideas on what you would like to see in future releases here.

If you can supply your thoughts there we can keep them all in one place and collate them for consideration accordingly.

Many thanks!

What a way to pitch

2010-11-02T10:23:00.003Z

I just received this pitching e-mail from a company and, given the nature of the e-mail, it's quite ironic how they've started it off:

[Click on image for a larger version]

I've written back to point out that I am, in fact, a man.

Arriba Arriba

2010-11-01T14:55:00.002Z

As you may know last week we opened pre-registrations for the 100Mb broadband service, which is being so ably promoted by Speedy Gonzales (who you can follow on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/speedy by the way) and to celebrate the launch the media relations team managed to get some very flash cars out to act as London taxis ... a Ferrari F430, a Porsche 911 Turbo and an Aston Martin DBS.

They happened to rock up outside our Covent Garden offices so I nipped out to get a few pictures:

[My colleague Ryan and Simon from our brand team, L-R]

Did anybody else spot them around London, and more importantly did anyone get a ride in one? If so, were they as much fun as they looked?

I gather we’re looking into whether we can have some elsewhere in the country too so keep your eyes peeled!

Speedy Gonzales

2010-10-25T13:25:00.001+01:00

The Speedy Gonzales TV advertisement that debuted during the X Factor at the weekend can be found here on YouTube:

Crackers

2010-10-21T22:31:00.003+01:00

We had a billboard made entirely of cheese installed in Covent Garden today to promote our broadband services with 100Mb on the way.

With it being around the corner from the office I had to drop by for a look:What I didn't see though was a supply of cream crackers nearby. I'll have to have a word with the PR team in the morning.

As a customer said on Facebook today:

"Virgin media gone into the carpet business? 'Underlay, underlay!'"

Groan!

My issues with Apple

2010-10-17T18:22:00.006+01:00

This week Apple appear to set to make their latest consumer product announcement with plenty of speculation all over the web as to what it might be.

Personally I couldn't care less as I won't be buying it whatever it is.

And before I go on to explain why, I'd like to remind you that this is my own personal opinion and doesn't form the opinions of anyone else, including my employer!

The issue I have with Apple is the fanboy mentality that their products have generated amongst a certain niche of the population.

This type of person is perfectly summed up by a BBC TV news story when Apple launched the iPhone4 in the UK in June.

A teenage girl in the Apple store in London who'd just purchased one was asked by a reporter why she needed one. Her response was:

"I dunno really, I just do"

This was mere seconds after she had spent hundreds of pounds buying one - and this was on the device's first day of launch - in fact she was probably one of the disciples that I saw queued for one when I walked past the Apple store at 830am on launch day:
'Disciple' is not a word I use lightly, as there is an almost Jones-like slavish devotion to buying their products (at whatever the cost) from those who queue for hours (even days, as in one report in the US on the iPad launch), buy every single version of every Apple product as soon as they come out and go on and on and on about how great they are and how everyone should have one.

I wouldn't mind if people were buying them on merit as the best product to suit their needs based on having researched the product and found it to be the best in the market.

Some do (such as my colleague and friend Nick), but a heck of a lot don't - people want to be seen with the white headphones, so they buy an iPod. They want people to see them with an iPad so they get it out on the train and hold it up in a way where everyone on the carriage can't help but have it thrust down their throat - almost saying "I have a new Apple product, look how great I am".

When one version of the iPod first came out I was in the market for an MP3 player so I asked around for some recommendations and tried it out in a shop along with a Creative one and an iRiver. The iRiver had the best sound quality of those in my price range, so I bought that. I don't care what colour the headphones are or how 'cool' I look with it - I'm interested in the storage space, the user interface and the sound quality.

The Apple 'sheep' (as I call the devotee) doesn't, and will only consider the Apple product regardless of its quality, functionality or cost. If an iPod cost £10,000 they'd buy it. This way of thinking is well summarised in the below not safe for work video:

Plus Scott Adams has a good take on the same mentality via Dilbert:

The other thing that annoys me about the sheep mentality is the suggestion (by the sheep themselves) that the Apple way should be applied across everything.

In my day job I get to work on bringing products to market and making sure they deliver the correct end user experience. Countless times I have heard phrases like:

"You should design it like an Apple product."

People who say that are generally the same, self selecting users who have the company's products coming out of their ears. And that's the point really - they're self selecting.

The 84 year old in my local pub wouldn't use an iPod and designing a product for him that works like one isn't going to be of any use whatsoever. While the products they design work well for people they design them for, I doubt they would for those who would never use one - so I do need to think differently.

At this point I have a confession to get off my chest.

I actually purchased an iPod once as a gift for someone, but did bore them to tears in ensuring that they had done due diligence and were buying it based on its merits rather than its 'cool' factor, so I didn't feel quite so bad. To me it's a triumph of marketing over functionality (as The Telegraph so succinctly put it), but it did the job for them and they were happy.

The sheep mentality is not for me and I won't be buying whatever this week's new product is for myself ... I'll stick with doing my own research and choosing my tech on merit rather than marketing.

Good time today lol

2010-10-16T17:22:00.003+01:00

I've just been having a look at my Twitter wordcloud over at tweetstats (the below screenshot was after I imported it into Wordle) and, other than reminding myself that I do tweet quite a lot, I also managed to make a sentence of 'good time today lol' out of some of my most commonly used words:So I seem to have the perfect antidote to a friend who accused me of being miserable on Twitter this morning :-)

Our discovery channel

2010-10-15T14:28:00.003+01:00

Recently we launched what we are calling the 'Broadband Discovery Zone', which is a section on our website that looks like this ...
... and can be found here.

So why have we done this? From all the feedback from our broadband customers (as well as with a bit of research thrown in) the messages that we hear loud and clear are that the most important things to them are: their speed, the reliability of their connection and their security when online, especially when news like this appears in the press.

We set up the Broadband Discovery Zone to give some top tips on the common problems people might experience with their broadband and what they can do to fix them. With well over half of the speed and connectivity related problems our customers experience being down to their own equipment (hardware, software, wireless routers etc) there's plenty that we've learned that we are happy to pass on.

As well as tips, tricks and useful information about what to do when you have a speed or connectivity problem, there's a section in the Broadband Discovery Zone about ensuring you're safe when online with advice about how to secure your wireless network included. Given this can be quite complex to do, our Digital Home Support Team are also there to help (this is a chargeable service – more details on this can be found here).

Also included in the Broadband Discovery Zone are some help videos for our customers and news on developments to our network – including the increased upload speeds we announced last week.

While we've deliberately kept the Broadband Discovery Zone focused on the most common queries we get from customers and advice on how they can help themselves without needing to give us a call, we’re interested in any and all feedback on what else we should put into it in future – do please let us know your thoughts.

For another blog ...

2010-10-15T11:31:00.003+01:00

This isn't what I would call a 'proper' blog posting (I'm working on another of those at the moment) but is an opportunity for me to upload a Twitter conversation (from TweetDeck) between our fab Twitter team (see here for more about them) and a customer as I want to correct some misconceptions on his blog about how they work and need to be able to upload a screenshot of the conversation.
So apologies for the unusual blog post!

Kick-ASM

2010-10-13T10:04:00.001+01:00

A service improvement initiative our networks and change teams have been working on rolling out is something called Advanced Spectrum Management or ASM for short.

ASM is intelligence within our access network (well it sits at the bridge between the access and IP networks) that identifies problems that would otherwise result in customer affecting outages, and by flicking a clever switch in the background ensures that customers maintain service while we get working on fixing the root cause of the problem.

Any particularly tecchie people out there might want to read up more about what it is and what it does on the Cisco website here.

Many outages have been prevented as a result of the rollout of ASM, which recently completed and is showing to be a great success in terms of keeping our customers’ broadband and interactive/VoD services connected when things do go wrong on the network that need to be addressed.

So how well has it actually done? Well thankfully (for people like me), I've been sent a presentation on it that distils the oodles of technical detail that I know is behind this into a high level summary – and I think the graph below of tickets (faults) raised speaks for itself:

[Click on the image for a larger version, scale removed as it’s commercially sensitive]

ASM is helping our networks team do a better job and ensuring less customers are affected when we do have problems and also helping us focus on areas where further attention is needed to improve things even more in future, so overall it’s been a great job well done by all.

Sofa Shenanigans

2010-09-28T10:49:00.006+01:00

We’ve made quite extensive use of social media in Virgin Media (as can be seen in the presentation I posted last week) and are doing more things in the future.
One of the successes we’ve had over the last year or so has been something that we call ‘The Sofa’, which is in essence a community we set up in order for customers to be able to give us feedback and generate ideas about our products – alongside the help & support forums we have setup to compliment our invite-only ‘Sofa’ community (customers being invited based on survey feedback they have given us).

We’ve learnt a lot from it, taken plenty of ideas back into Virgin Media and are always being challenged with interesting questions to answer.

The next step was clearly for us a really good event I was lucky to attend (along with our product, marketing, customer research and PR teams and a number of our senior management team) in our London offices last Friday - a face to face get together with some of the customers.

After a bit of a meet and greet we were able to quiz customers about what services they have from Virgin Media, what they do and don’t like and their ideas for other things we could be doing and how we can do things better – which is my day job after all!

After some lunch we went through some presentations from the product teams covering how we’re bringing together home phone and mobile services, what’s coming up in the near future for broadband (100Mb, more upstream speeds etc) and the presentation that seemed to get the most people excited, the one about TiVo.

We followed up with some ‘speed dating’ where we paired up with customers and got to dig deeper into some of their issues and ideas and I came away with oodles of great insight after a really enjoyable day interacting with customers direct – which is something I always love doing.

From speaking to those present they all seemed to get a lot out of it (both staff and customers) and I’ve included some pictures from the day below.

The voice (home phone & mobile) team 'speed dating' with customers

One of the breaks - the PR, broadband, mobile and customer research teams speaking to customers

Home Phone director Alex Perrin (far right) shares a cuppa with some customers

The marketing team 'speed dating' with customers

Talking TiVo with the TV team

With some customers even coming from as far away as Scotland for it, thanks for taking the time out to help us improve our products and services even more – it really is appreciated.

We look forward to doing more events like this in the future.

Presentation to Institute of Customer Service

2010-09-20T11:28:00.002+01:00

I've been asked by the Institute of Customer Service to do a presentation in Birmingham tomorrow about how Virgin Media is using social media for customer service, and the slides can be found below (hosted at SlideShare) if you're interested:

Thanks to all those who've helped out with information, especially our wonderful media relations and Twitter teams!

@virginmedia Wordcloud

2010-09-14T11:14:00.004+01:00

Am working on some slides for a presentation about social media customer service, and I headed over to Wordle to do a Wordcloud of our @virginmedia Twitter feed - which I thought you might like to see:Click on the image for a larger version.

Seasoned followers of us on Twitter will recognise 'st' as being the signoff from Sam of the 'Twitter tweam' as well as 'bmc' being Billy and 'pm' Pete of the same team respectively. They're doing a wonderful job and we think they're great.

Dilbert

2010-09-13T12:10:00.002+01:00

I do enjoy the daily Dilbert e-mails that I get through - and today's has to be the funniest one I've seen for a long time.

Reminds me of a few conversations I've had with some companies about social media!

Quake!

2010-09-08T14:54:00.004+01:00

Growing up a country that’s very young (geologically that is, although John Cunningham probably still jokes that it closed at 8pm … In 1950!) as New Zealand is, earthquakes are a fact of life – and it’s the seismic activity that brought about most of New Zealand’s natural beauty.

I’ve been in a few in my time, the most memorable of which was one that was (if I remember rightly) a 6.7 on the Richter Scale and really shook the house up at breakfast time at our house in Dunedin.

But this weekend it’s been something quite different, with a massive quake of 7.1 hitting Canterbury. The epicentre was about the same distance off the coast of Christchurch as the Haiti quake (also a 7.1) was to Port-au-Prince.

It was the worst quake in New Zealand for 80 years, when there were two 7.8 quakes in a period of two years (my late grandmother remembered the Murchison quake only too well).

While 230,000 people were killed in Haiti there was just one person lost in the Canterbury quake, and that was due to a heart attack during the big shake.

There’s an interesting article as to why there was such a big difference here, but the fact it was at 0435 in the morning and in a much richer country have to be the key factors (the ‘depth’ of the epicentre in the earth is usually the other key one). All the same, something like NZD$4bn worth of damage has been caused (c£1.9bn).

I don’t have any close family (just some cousins of my Dad, and they are all fine - but dealing with property damage) in the Christchurch area, but my best friend from school Bernie lives there and posted some scary pictures on Facebook (which I have blatantly plagiarised):
I feel especially sorry for his daughter, who has been terrified with all the aftershocks, and it’s been really heart wrenching to read some of the bloggers and Twitterers, but at the same time some of the most spectacular pictures have been posted online:
Also, have a look at the Google Earth visualisation of the quake.

While some of the gallows humour (a friend of mine decided it wasn’t serious as Dunedin was just lightly shaken awake and no beer spilt!) has no doubt kept spirits up, it does make me think of the ‘big one’ we were always told was on the way as I grew up … and most likely to hit Wellington (where my nephews live). Fingers crossed it doesn’t happen in their lifetime.

E-mail help videos

2010-08-27T11:54:00.002+01:00

My colleague Steph has been working hard with the wider Virgin Media team over the last few months on getting a whole suite of new help videos available on our website to help our customers out, and they're starting to flow through to YouTube as well.

While I'll post some more of them over time, I thought I'd share two of the first ones - those for Virgin Media Mail (our Google powered e-mail service).

The video about the basics of the service can be found here:
And the advanced version here:
More videos can be found in the help section of our website, and any and all feedback is appreciated!

Air NZ's great safety video

2010-08-20T08:10:00.003+01:00

Coming from the rugby obsessed nation of New Zealand, it's hard to explain to someone in the UK just how much it permeates every nook and cranny of Kiwi culture.

I really enjoyed this link I got sent this morning though of Air New Zealand updating their on board safety video ahead of next year's Rugby World Cup:
Graham Henry needs to stick to being a coach though, as I can't see a glittering career in acting just over the horizon.

A funny thing happened on the way to the office

2010-08-13T17:38:00.001+01:00

If today, being Friday the 13th is the day where unlucky and weird things happen – it'd take some topping of my trip to work yesterday.

I got on the bus at 745am to see a jaw dropping sight.

On the bus there was man dressed in a very smart business suit (which I can only liken to the sort that vendors always wear when they're in trying to sell you something) with impeccable hair and shoes – who must have been in his early 30s and had his Bluetooth headset in with a very expensive laptop sat on top of his brief case.

So what's odd about that? Also on top of his briefcase was an open one of these he was drinking:This is not something you expect to see before 8 in the morning. Were I less stunned I’d have got a picture on my camera phone, but it does make me wonder what meeting he was off to that would result in such a thing happening at that time of day?

Overall it was quite an odd day with running into a man walking a ferret down Long Acre in London too (am told this isn’t actually that unusual, but it looked very strange to me) – but what’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen on your way into the office?

Today I walked to the station.

Football's back

2010-08-08T11:31:00.004+01:00

I'm looking forward to the football season starting and glad Rafa Benitez has gone (having achieved all he was ever going to with Liverpool), with Roy Hodgson now on board to lead the mighty reds.

Yesterday I wandered past the local (Woking) football ground and noticed they were playing Luton (where my mate Ben is from) in a friendly, so I thought I'd have a look online this morning to see how they got on (Luton won 2-1).

Two things struck me from the Woking FC website - firstly that a club at this level is using YouTube to upload their match highlights and get additional exposure, which is a good sign given how technologically naive football clubs were when I was involved with them a decade ago.

The other thing was the league table shown on another page on the site:And zoomed in:Seriously, if you were the last team in the division you're in alphabetically you wouldn't show a league table with you in last place on your own official website before the first game was played would you?

90% of all e-mail is spam

2010-07-30T13:51:00.005+01:00

That's an incredible statistic that took me aback when I first saw it (in March from Symantec), which is why security vendors have been so successful in the development and takeup of anti-spam products – such as the ones that Google acquired and implemented into their Google Apps platform, where our customer mailboxes are now all hosted. Spam e-mail levels were also up 16% in the second quarter of this year compared to the first (according to Google).

Previously mailboxes for Virgin Media customers were hosted on three different platforms, all of which took a different approach to dealing with spam (and in fact viruses) coming as they did from the three ISPs that we ran before Virgin Media came together.

In the last few weeks, as the @ntlworld.com migration from the old platform to the Google one has completed, we've seen an increase in customers reporting an increase in spam – and I'd like to explain why this is, and what customers can do about it.

Our previous platform was configured to reject the most obvious of spam messages, so they would be either bounced or actually deleted without ever hitting a customer's mailbox or being seen by them – so, while customers may have noticed an increase in spam messages there's actually no more being attempted to be sent to them than there was on the previous platform, now they just appear in a user's spam folder on webmail.

The previous platform was classifying around half of e-mails inbound for @ntlworld.com mailboxes as spam – which is a heck of a lot of e-mail:

[Note: The volumes have dropped as mailboxes were migrated off this platform and to Google]

As you would probably expect, we always took a conservative approach to what was and wasn't classified as spam given that we didn't have the tools to allow a customer to 'fine tune' their own spam filter (unlike how we do now on Google) – but even then we were still deleting around 20 million messages per day of the most obvious spam without them ever getting to a customer's mailbox.

So, what should a user now on the Google platform do if they are seeing a noted increase in spam messages?

1. Tune their spam filter

In Virgin Media mail (i.e. webmail) you can tune the spam filter to tell it what a user considers to be both spam and not spam (as one person's spam is another's valuable e-mail).

This is easy enough to do, by opening the message and clicking on 'Report Spam' if it's a spam message delivered to a user's Inbox – like this one I received overnight:

[Note: Screenshot, like others, is of Gmail – where I import my Virgin Media Mail. Slightly different colours etc accordingly.]

Similarly if a user finds what is a genuine message appearing in their spam folder they should open the message in webmail and click 'Not Spam'.

Doing both these helps the platform learn what the end user considers to be spam and not spam and is used in the decision making process around e-mail delivery to them in future.

2. Add contacts

If someone regularly e-mails a user and they want the e-mails delivered rather than classified as spam, they should put them in their 'Contacts' (link on left hand side navigation of webmail) address book.

This also makes it a bit easier when typing e-mail addresses into webmail in future as it auto remembers them, as well as other features like being able to create a mailing list of people someone regularly e-mails.

3. Use filters

Once the spam filter has been tuned over time to a point where someone is confident that no genuine e-mail is being classified as spam, they might want to consider setting up a filter in Virgin Media Mail whereby any spam messages will be deleted rather than put into the spam folder.

There's more info on how to do this in the help pages on webmail (and we do advise to only do it when a user is confident no genuine mails are appearing in their spam folder), and I think this is something I must do myself this weekend given the amount of mail in my spam folder (which is down to my address having been used in public forums and on web pages for the last decade):A filter whereby mail from a particular user will never be classified as spam (in addition to adding them to the contacts list) can also be setup. This is done by following these steps:

i) Open a message from the e-mailer in question
ii) Click on the option to 'Filter messages like this' from the menu (use the down arrow) beside the 'Reply' link
iii) Enter the sender's e-mail address
iv) Click 'Next Step'
v) Select the checkbox beside 'Never send it to Spam'

Once done messages from that particular e-mail address will always be delivered straight to the Inbox and never appear in the Spam folder.

4. Prevent it in the first place!

Of course the best way to not get so much spam is to make sure it doesn't get sent in the first place - which is done by being careful where an e-mail address is used and who it is given out to, never replying to a spam e-mail and never buying a spammer's products.

Another good tip is to try and make life a bit more difficult for the automated software spammers use when you do post on the web such as on social networks. When posting on the web, use spacing around the '@' sign to do this – e.g. support @ virginmedia.com rather than support@virginmedia.com.

These, and other good tips, are covered in this BBC article.

However, it is important to note that a user will not be able to prevent all spam – spammers have software that guesses e-mail addresses in huge volumes and sends them spam e-mail. This is known as a 'dictionary' attack and, while we filter huge numbers of these attacks into user's spam folders, some will always get through to Inboxes.

We're going to add some further advice to our website to beef up the advice on how to manage spam in the next few days to provide more assistance.

8 out of 10 prefer Google

2010-07-17T10:13:00.012+01:00

For some time (as covered in previous blogs) we have been running a project to move our consumer e-mail services over to the Google Apps platform.

New customers have been provisioned onto the Google platform from mid last year, and we are now in the final stages of migrating the last of 6.8m existing customer mailboxes over to Google with the imminent completion of the @ntlworld.com Google migration - after which we open up @virginmedia.com e-mail addresses to existing customers who wish to adopt them and close the project down.

In April we undertook some questionnaire based research of customers who had been affected by the project in order to see how we've done and to make any changes needed for the remainder of the migrations - although clearly we have been tracking calls and feedback to our customer care teams on a daily basis throughout the programme.

We surveyed a statistically significant 975 customers, who were split as such:

14% 'new' customers (who joined after we launched @virginmedia.com addresses for new customers and have only ever been on the Google platform for their e-mail)
31% migrated National customers with @virgin.net e-mail addresses
55% migrated cable customers with @blueyonder.co.uk e-mail addresses

The first question we asked was a general status check as to what people thought of the new webmail - and over 80% of them were positive about it:

Fig 1: Overall webmail rating of new and migrated customers. Click on image for a larger version.

One thing we particularly wanted to test was how the migrated webmail users reacted to the new Google platform, given that it is significantly different from the older interfaces that customers were on before they moved to Google.

Encouragingly three quarters (well, 74%) of them found the Google platform to be an improvement:

Fig 2: Comparison of previous webmail service with Google platform for migrated customers

A big consideration we had in moving customers to Google was the customers who still choose to use client software (such as Outlook Express or Windows Mail) rather than webmail - and that we wanted to minimise the impact to them, bearing in mind that some would still need to make changes in the interim and that all would in the longer term as we adopt the Google client settings.

We put a number of tools in place to minimise this impact, and are encouraged by how few client users noticed the migration - with many of those telling us that it was only because we both e-mailed them beforehand to let them know it was coming and afterwards to confirm their mailbox had been moved:

Fig 3 : Impact of migration on client software users

This is backed up by 9 out of 10 customers (89%) telling us that the detail of the e-mail communication was "just enough" for them and that 70% of users did not need to use the help pages:

Fig 4 : Customer usage of Virgin Media Mail help

We've been doing some usability work to address customers who found it difficult to find the help content, but encouragingly they managed to get by with very few customers needing to contact us compared with our forecasts:

Fig 5 : Actual customer contacts compared with forecasts. Scale removed as commercially sensitive.

We also asked customers if they wanted to share any free-form comments on how their experience has been, and I thought some might be interested in a selection of them:

Fig 6 : Free-form customer feedback about Virgin Media Mail

With the project coming to a close, our team are now working on future developments including improved mobile functionality - which is something our customers have been telling us they would like to see.

I had the privilege of being the commercial owner of the project throughout many of the key timescales, and would like to congratulate and thank the project team on doing such a good job throughout (you know who you all are), and thank my successor Giorgi and Francesca from our research team for the data and the nicely reusable PowerPoint slides :)

Activate Me

2010-07-11T18:33:00.001+01:00

One of the many projects I am working on at the moment is one with the broadband team to overhaul our cable broadband activation process and to rollout a new 'hub' device which merges the cable modem and wireless router into one.

In fact I have wangled myself onto the 'hub' trial, and my device that arrived in the post last week looks like this:This is for customers on speeds 20Mb and under, with a further device doing the same function to come for those on 50Mb and above.

From reviewing feedback from customers and staff members it came through loud and clear that setting up of a wireless network is difficult and can cause all kinds of issues, so the merging of the two devices into one and having engineers setup the network for customers as well as a much improved activation process will make life easier for one and all.The new activation process also streamlines the setup of Virgin Media e-mail addresses and the installation of other tools such as security and Digital Home Support for those who wish to use them, and we’ve done plenty of testing of the flows with customers also in recent usability testing – getting some brilliant feedback and making a number of tweaks thanks to the usability work.

It’s been an enormous amount of work from the project team, but as we’re at the stage of signing off the final activation flows and testing the physical 'hub' devices we’re not far off and customers will start seeing the new process soon … once we’ve got everything ready and everyone who needs to be is trained up.

I find it all very exciting really ... And on that note I’m off to test my new hub!

World Cup Traffic

2010-06-25T14:28:00.007+01:00

I noted yesterday that the BBC said they had 800,000 concurrent streams of people watching the England v Slovenia match on Tuesday, which I watched in our Covent Garden offices in London - and didn't Kevin in our facilities team do a cracking job of decorating the TV area for?:So I thought I'd find out from Tim in our networks team (who is a general all round transit, routing and peering guru) what proportion of those were our residential customers - and I got all kinds of interesting graphs in response.

Ahead of the World Cup the networks team worked with the BBC and Akamai (the main streaming provider for the tournament) to put in place some dedicated peering links for World Cup (and Wimbledon) traffic and from the peaks we've seen over those links they've certainly been being used:

[Click on for a larger version; Note: Scale removed as figures are commercially sensitive]

We experienced a definite traffic spike when the match was being played on Wednesday compared to a 'normal' Wednesday daytime:

[Fig 2: Total Virgin Media Internet Traffic, 23/6/2010 vs 9/6/2010; Note: Scale removed as figures are commercially sensitive]

Note also the relative dip in the evening as the never ending tennis match on Tuesday night dragged people away from their broadband connections and in front of the TV as well as the evening's football match ... and no doubt a few people out celebrating!

Having a look at the traffic on our dedicated Akamai ports also shows a significant spike in traffic:[Fig 3: Traffic levels over Virgin Media's dedicated Akamai private peer; Note: Scale removed as figures are commercially sensitive]

We believe that we had something in the region of 35,000 to 37,500 concurrent streams (and a 30% increase in traffic compared to the same period on a 'normal' Wednesday) watching the match at any one time which, given our market share, would suggest to me that the BBC had the majority of their streams coming from people watching the game from work connections rather than their home ISP broadband connections.

By contrast, for England's opening match (which was in the evening on a Saturday) we saw an 8% decrease in overall Internet traffic (compared to a 'normal' Saturday) as people watched the game on TV in the main:

[Fig 4: Total Virgin Media Internet Traffic, 12/6/2010 vs 5/6/2010; Note: Scale removed as figures are commercially sensitive]

Overall though I was happiest at the result on Thursday, when my native New Zealand team managed to finish the whole tournament unbeaten - unlike Spain, Germany, France and Italy ... and ahead of Italy in our group to top off a magnificent performance. Well done to them all!

Funny comment spam

2010-06-22T08:17:00.004+01:00

I've been asked by a few people why I have moderation turned on for comments on my blog. It's no great conspiracy theory, and I do approve any valid comments apart from a few very sweary ones as I don't want anyone to be offended.

The reason why is comment spam like this, which came through overnight:

[Click on Image for a larger version]

Like I'm ever going to approve that! *reject*

Twaffic Problems

2010-06-17T00:26:00.003+01:00

I’ll admit to being a bit of a geek when it comes to social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) in terms of how companies are making use of it in particular and am always interested in good case studies accordingly.

Another thing I love about social media is the quirky things that wouldn't happen otherwise, such as a case I spotted this morning on Twitter.

One of our change managers this week tweeted his frustration (slightly cleaned up his message for a family audience!) at being stuck in traffic on the M6:Oh, and I'd like to point out that Gavin sent this message after he had pulled into the services!

The response to that took me aback – with traffic advice coming in from Canada, where a former colleague (Kari) in our procurement team who has since returned to Ontario decided to Google it and informs Gavin:I find that brilliant – and it wouldn’t have happened without the power of social media.

Eircom "intimidating" customers on Twitter

2010-06-15T19:28:00.006+01:00

This all sounds very familiar - Irish telco Eircom have been alleged to be "intimidating" users on Twitter by replying to them when they post problems they are having with them in the public domain on the site.

Like when providers in the UK were accused of "spying" on users last week, the story comes in The Mail on Sunday, although this time it's the Irish edition - and the story can be found over at Stephen Beynon's Posterous (declaration - Stephen runs the consumer division at Eircom and I know him well from when he used to run the business division at Virgin Media).

This particularly made me smile:I really can't see how that has any relevance at all to be honest.

There's an excellent blog about the story here and Eircom's Twitter feed can be found here. They appear to be doing good work, so keep it up guys!

That's a lot of spam

2010-06-10T22:35:00.004+01:00

I've got into the habit of emptying my Gmail spam folder daily - but, having decided not to for a bit, I've been surprised by how much I've received since Monday:The reason I get so much is that I've used my (actual - not masked) e-mail address across the web for years in order to help out customers and join in discussions (and hence spammers have added my address to their lists), letting the spam filters take the strain. Now that all my e-mail accounts are aggregated on Google though, it's not exactly a big strain to take.

And for the record, I've had no false positives (mails classified as spam when they shouldn't have been) and only 2 false negatives (mails that weren't classified as spam but should have been) this week, and now I've reported those as spam hopefully the spam filter on Google means they won't reappear!

Excellent blog

2010-06-08T23:18:00.003+01:00

I did a few blogs a while ago about the first decade of broadband in the UK, which was marked with the anniversary of our 512Kb launch in March 2000 - and I really enjoyed the blog today from one of our customers Scott Allison ... who poses a fascinating question:

[...] where will be in another ten years and what revolutionary new businesses and business models are yet to be enabled by the internet?

I've often been surprised by what I've seen over the last decade ... and I think it's safe to assume I'll be astounded to think about what's happened when am looking back on things in 2020.

Brands and social media - it's not spying

2010-06-06T11:00:00.006+01:00

There's a story at Mail Online today (and presumably also in The Mail on Sunday accordingly, it's not a paper I take) where leading brands are being accused of spying on their customers by taking part in conversations about them on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Some of Britain’s biggest firms were last night accused of ‘spying’ on their customers after they admitted ‘listening in’ on disgruntled conversations on the internet.

The companies include BT, which uses specially developed software to scan for negative comments about it on websites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

[...] privacy campaigners have accused them of ‘outright spying’ while legal experts have suggested that firms making unsolicited approaches to customers could fall foul of data protection laws.

This is just not the case. Companies such as BT, and us at Virgin Media, are present on social media as we're aware that our customers are talking about us and want to hear what they have to say - and to help where it's appropriate to do so.

As people may know, we have had a presence on Twitter since December 2008 as a company, and with a number of our more enthusiastic staff members having been on the site earlier than that it was clear that customers were on Twitter asking questions about our products and seeking help - so naturally we had to join in that conversation, which is going to happen about us whether we're involved in it or not.People posting on Twitter generally have their profiles in public (we can't see what they post otherwise, as it requires people to be following each other to see what is being posted via a protected account) and hence what they post is open to be viewed by anyone on the web, so why would a brand not be using social media monitoring tools to see what is being said about them and act on it accordingly?

Clearly companies need to be using their judgment when engaging with customers on sites such as Twitter, and I wouldn't begin to claim we've always got it right. You need to learn from your mistakes, and the only way to do so is dive in 'boots and all' and engage with your customers.

We set up a Twitter team in our customer care area (Billy, Sam and Pete for anyone who has dealt with them) to deal with customers seeking help on Twitter, and the results have been fantastic.

Their first priority is to help customers who message us direct (i.e. the equivalent of sending us an e-mail) with enquiries and/or asking for help, and we've found that generally the quickest way to solve problems is for customers to e-mail in some details and the team then gets on the case to resolve the issue.

They're empowered to do so and act as if they were the customer internally - which has enabled internal facing areas of the business to get some great, instant direct feedback from customers and resulted in many process improvements that benefit our customers as a whole.

What the team also does is to use various social media monitoring tools to see Twitter users talking about Virgin Media but not 'to' us direct. These can be customers (sometimes including celebs) talking to each other, non customers querying our products and services, the media, analysts and others - and this is where the team makes a judgment call as to how to engage, if we need to at all.

The likes of media and analysts are fairly straightforward, and our media relations team deals with these either via our main feed (which our head of media relations setup alongside myself in the first place, and still posts to regularly) or by taking it offline to talk to the respondent direct - often the most appropriate way as it's difficult to answer often complex media enquiries in 140 characters!

Customers talking about problems they are experiencing but not to us direct are the main source of our 'wow' experiences - or, as someone once said, taking them from woe to wow. Many people aren't aware that we have a presence on Twitter, and when we step in to a conversation or post to someone talking about us the reaction is almost universally positive.

Picking up that customer's issue and resolving it tends to be the type of experience that results in external blogs (for example here and here), independent recognition and thank you e-mails into us from customers - and the success stories help us reiterate internally the importance of engagement in social media from a customer service perspective.

We regularly survey our customers who interact with Virgin Media as to what their experience is, using the Net Promoter® Score (NPS) framework. It's little heard of within what is effectively a complaints function (which is what the Twitter team does much of the time) for a customer to recommend their experience and give a 9 or 10 (out of 10) score on their survey - but our Twitter team hits this time and again, breaking many advocacy records along the way.

Using social media monitoring tools to find out what is being said about you and to act on it is not spying - it's moving with the times and realising that as a company you need to engage with a customer in the way they wish to speak to you or even about you - you just need to use your common sense and learn where it is and isn't appropriate to engage with users, and on the best way to do so.

And our experience tells us that it's also what our customers want.

Today's spam

2010-05-31T10:53:00.006+01:00

I've blogged before about the experience I got when my blueyonder mailbox was migrated off the old Microsoft mail platform and onto the Google Apps one - and now that I aggregate all my e-mail accounts into my Google one I've been spotting some interesting trends in terms of spam.

A few weeks ago I was inundated (and I mean really inundated, with hundreds an hour at one point) with microcap pump & dump spam, and the trend from the last 24 hours is also interesting - something like half of the spam mail in my spam folder are being sent 'from' me:Although it's good to see one knighted me - I presume it wasn't for sponsoring the project to move customers onto the Google platform with all it's great spam and virus filtering?

On a serious note, it's a clear sign for me of spammers adapting and trying different techniques as spam filters take counter measures to whatever their latest attack approach is.

Incidentally, I'm no longer sponsoring the Google project but I did catch up with the product owner and project manager last week - the 'first pass' of the last round of migrations (@ntlworld.com) to the Google platform has been completed and they're now working on fixing the 'complex' migrations (where the first attempt to migrate failed, for whatever reason - the failure not being customer affecting) and re-migrating those mailboxes over to Google ... after which we'll launch the ability for customers to move to @virginmedia.com e-mail addresses if they wish to and the project will be over.

It seems that things are going well too, with the inbound contacts to technical support being well under what was forecast - meaning that the team have been able to migrate higher volumes than was originally planned on a daily basis, with us being ahead of plan accordingly. That's no mean feat with mailbox volumes being in seven figures.

For anyone looking for help on the @ntlworld.com migrations, they might want to check out the migration FAQs, the help site and the help & support forums.

So with my @ntlworld.com mailbox now on the Google platform too it'll be interesting to see what other techniques spammers try to get around the filters.

Early Christmas in Surrey

2010-05-30T16:38:00.002+01:00

I was amused by seeing this on my way home on Friday night - looks like Arriva Buses need to do some work on their generic 'Bank Holiday Timetable' messages in Surrey:

Twitter Cull

2010-05-09T13:54:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I did a cull of my followers on Twitter as well as those I was following, using the following criteria:

Spam accounts - most of which are pretty obvious
Those who only tweet from automated services (and are hence not 'active' in my mind) such as those terrible Twittascope horoscopes and people telling me how far they've run today
Those who have never tweeted
Those who have not tweeted for >6 months
People who don't engage with others (including engaging with me!) on Twitter

And the results were significant - I purged 519 followers, hopefully not getting anyone I didn't mean to but I did try to err on the side of caution:

[Graph from TwitterCounter - see here]

With Twitter having got a lot better at dealing with spam hopefully it won't be too much work to keep on top of followers in future, although I'm having to make a resolution to review & decide as new followers come in from now on.

In the end I only ended up stopping to follow 45 accounts, as I have tended to keep up housekeeping on that on an ongoing basis.

Does it show that I'm having a long weekend and off 'til Tuesday?

Forum Fanciers

2010-04-29T16:59:00.002+01:00

In March we re-allocated the technical support staff that had previously been helping customers on the Virgin Media newsgroups – which, to be fair, required a bit of technical knowledge for customers to setup and use – to our help & support forums, which launched successfully last year and have gone from strength to strength.

And it's had the intended results. More customers are using the forums than ever before (plus they have a bigger reach than the newsgroups ever did) to help each other out with their questions, problems and tips on our services and the support guys are doing an excellent job in helping customers out also.

I guess it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out when the newsgroup community switched over either:

[Click for a larger version, thanks to our community manager Mark Wilkin for the graph]

If you've not already done so, do feel free to have a look at the forums and signup yourself. They can be found at http://community.virginmedia.com

Great Error Message

2010-04-13T14:06:00.004+01:00

Looks like Twitter's had a short outage this afternoon, which became apparent when I just came back from lunch to see Echofon (my Firefox based Twitter client) giving me abuse:A bit harsh to call me a nonce though!

Update @1826: I see Echofon already know about it from their changelog, and have deployed a fix. I shall update my client version then!

Digital Home Support help video

2010-04-13T12:21:00.002+01:00

We've started doing some help videos around our products and services, and one has gone up on YouTube for our new Digital Home Support service:

E-mail help videos are to follow.

A decade of broadband: Technical Support's early days

2010-04-01T16:06:00.004+01:00

A guest blog by Austin Clark (right), now an Application Specialist in Virgin Media's Technology team, but once a pioneer of blueyonder Technical Support

Lo,

I've been asked to share some tales from the days when our Broadband offering required a Black and White license.

I was in the first intake of staff for the about to be launched blueyonder broadband product. For a mere £50 a month you could experience the "information superhighway" at a stunning 512kbps. That's 10 times faster than an ordinary dial up connection y'know (and a hundred times slower than our 50meg offering).

(Cue lots of web pages culled from the wayback machine from Alex featuring the infamous "Blue Whale" logo)

There I was, fresh from Uni and jobless. Having spent a month or two waiting for companies to come rushing to employ me it suddenly dawned on me that a more proactive approach to job hunting my be required. After a few interviews, including one with a Welsh bloke who had a fondness for wearing cowboy hats, I was lucky enough to be offered a job as a Technical Analyst for Telewest.

There were 18 of us in that first batch, mostly culled from other dialup ISPs of the time, and we didn't really know what to expect on that cold Valentine's morning in Liverpool.

Our training was to take place over 6 weeks in a pair of portakabins out the back of the office. This wasn't exactly the cutting edge Googleplex-style environment I'd envisaged!

The training was great fun, however. I always got the impression that, because it was a new product, they were never really sure what we'd need to know. So they trained us in EVERYTHING!

We had 2 whole weeks of Order entry & provisioning training. We had a fortnight being educated in the dark arts of Windows NT and Basic followed by wiring up dummy cabinets to Analogue and Digital set top boxes and something funky involving oscilloscopes*. This was topped off with field visits with repair & install techs before being finally brought back down to earth with the obligatory phone skills type training.

* To this day I can still work out the signal attentuation of different frequencies over RG6 and RG11 cable. No idea why I'd ever need to, of course, but it's a testament to the quality of the training we received.

What about Cable Modem training? Ah... Well, we were shown one for an hour by a gentleman called Loz who had wonderfully eccentric hair. He told us what the lights should do if the modem was powered up and connected to a live cable feed. Then he went back to Woking, taking the modem with him. It was a Motorola SB3100 [PDF] if you're interested.

Now that we'd completed the training we were ready for the heady cut and thrust of the live call centre. We arrived at the shiny new offices in the Albert Dock (which were a lot more impressive than the portakabins), also in Liverpool, and prepared to take some calls. The first call was taken by Gareth 'Foz' Griffiths - a gent and true Dock legend.

We already had 50 ready made customers in the form of triallists who, combined with our newly installed customers to rack up nearly twelve calls a day. In total. It wasn't unheard of to go a couple of shifts without actually taking a call at the time! We got to know quite a few of them by name back then, recalling a few of them makes me smile, a couple of them make me shudder.

Being a new department with entirely new staff always made it feel like a separate company at the time. Standard support processes, calls stats, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and even managers were all merely interesting concepts at the beginning. My own AHTs (call Average Handling Time) could've been measured on a calendar some days.

During the quiet periods we were able to get involved in project work, set up an unofficial knowledge base, help out interviewing and training the new intake and watch Fred on his weather map. There was a great feeling of being involved with something new and helping if to grow. There were opportunities that were around at that time for those early pioneers, there's many a Virgin Media bod around the business who cut their teeth getting the Cable Modems up and running.

Wasn't long before someone noticed we were quiet and we were volunteered to help with the influx of Surf Unlimited calls. The details of that product launch is probably best left to Alex, but needless to say there was plenty of work for us at the time. One crash course in Dial-up later and there was a lot less time for Keyboard Cricket.

I wish I had more space to describe in more detail some of the highlights, such as:

the customer who was asked to 'rewind' their blueyonder installation CD
the customer who wanted to disconnect the Internet because she'd read all of it
the customer who turned up at the dock in tears of fury after we'd disconnected him
customers not being next to the PC when troubleshooting
how many customers actually hand you over to their 10 yr old son to do the troubleshooting

some things are possibly best left to the imagination anyway. ;)

Needless to say we quickly ramped up both staff and customer numbers and the broadband product went from strength to strength. Support tools and processes were developed and redeveloped, many people came and went and eventually the Albert Dock became more integrated into the rest of the business. My AHT is still too long though - anyone that's been on conference call with me can verify that.

Back to the present day and 10 years after that launch I notice one of our competitors is birthing a new age of super fast broadband through a fibre optic cable. Sounds very innovative.

Bet they don't get to play with an oscilloscpe though.

A decade of broadband ... the beginning

2010-03-28T12:29:00.006+01:00

This week marks a very large milestone in telecommunications in the UK - it's a decade since Telewest launched the UK's first commercially available broadband service.

Cable broadband had been talked about and technical trials undertaken in both Telewest and NTL before then, with a number of aborted attempts by the Internet people in Telewest (the Cable Internet team) to launch a cable broadband service in the years preceding - much of which was down to doubts about how much consumer demand there would be!

Telewest had also launched a limited service available to schools in the Edinburgh area, with those on the Ecademy project getting one of these lovely compact (not) cable modems to power their service:By late 1999, it was agreed that we would launch a broadband service (or "HSD" as it was known then - High Speed Data, later becoming "HSI" - Hi-Speed Internet) and the Cable Internet dialup team along with specialist consultants from Ernst & Young, Hewlett Packard and others formed a project team to roll it out.

A sales team was established based out of Gillingham which only sold broadband - in fact any inbound broadband sales attempt to the general sales number resulted in the call being transferred to the dedicated sales team! - and that was also the headend we first launched the service from with customers in Maidstone being the first people in the UK to get a commercial broadband service.

The service launched on March 31, 2000 and was priced at £50 per month for a 512Kb broadband connection. Yes, that's Kb, not Mb. The price quickly dropped to £33 per month, NTL and BT followed with their broadband launches and the UK broadband market was born.

In fact we actually brought the launch forward a day just so that people believed us :-)

We came up with a new brand for our broadband service, which was blueyonder. In true brand consultant style it was not Blueyonder, Blue Yonder or any other concoction - one word, all in lower case. At the time our PR team spend an inordinate amount of time correcting media sources that got it wrong!

The service was marketed on being all the things that dialup wasn't, highlighting that the Internet would no longer tie up your phone line when someone called you and that it was an always on connection - no more negotiating the tedious dialup login process.

The symbol of blueyonder was the blue whale, there to symbolise the power of broadband and our first website included content from MSN in a co-branded deal. The first website is preserved on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:When the service launched the vast majority of Telewest's Internet customers were still on dialup and it took time to get people migrated over to broadband connections, with many amusing stories of how we described the benefits to customers - after all we were still learning ourselves.

The traditional home of Telewest was always Woking, and the blueyonder launch led to much change in that model for our technical teams - with technical support for broadband being setup at the Albert Dock in Liverpool (which is still one of our key technical support sites to this day) and a large infrastructure being setup at nearby Knowsley to support the service (also still a key site), from mail platforms to network enabling systems, test platforms and plenty more.

The project team moved around the country rolling out broadband as they went, introducing a whole slew of new acronyms to the business in the process - such as uBRs, DHCP, TFTP and any TLA you could think of.

By the end of 2000 we'd rolled broadband out to all of Telewest's regional headends and were working on the first speed uplifts.

I remember the rollout as being the best time of my working life, where we were all doing long hours but truly breaking new ground under the leadership of Gary Jennings, Graham Sargood, Chad Raube and Howard Watson - who are all well known for their cable connections (pun intended) to this day.

For my part I had joined Cable Internet as webmaster in 1998, which in those days meant I designed and built all the web pages along with writing most of the content for them (for many years afterwards all the help articles on the website were mine!) but also building, configuring and operationally running all the web servers that the sites ran on.

This all had a major overhaul with the blueyonder launch including the integration of all the MSN content and setting up new servers - in the days when load balancing was a foreign concept to systems people and all the sites ran on single servers with backups sitting on my desktop PC!

I also had to write heaps of customer communications, briefings for internal audiences and help out the PR team with how they were going to explain broadband to journalists - a very amusing thing to have done when you look back on it.

To think we've come from there to 50Mb broadband - with 100Mb announced and 200Mb being trialled - in less than a decade is a testament to me in what we actually achieved in being first to market and with the advantage of the superior cable technology, and they are times I will always remember fondly.

As the week continues I'll look to share some more of our decade of broadband, including a guest blog on the early days of broadband technical support.

The Independent on Sunday also has a good article today about the first decade of broadband too.

Surrealness … and what's your claim to fame?

2010-03-26T11:47:00.001Z

Yesterday I made a whistlestop trip to our offices in Birmingham to catch up with Mala the retentions reporting legend and it's fair to say my train journey back to Euston was eventful.

First for the surreal bit.

As I had to get back to London for 5 I dashed to get an earlier train back from Birmingham International, which I'd mentioned on Twitter – where one of the people I 'follow' is Craig, a Virgin Trains driver, who'd 'tweeted' a few minutes earlier that he was driving a train from Birmingham to London yesterday.

It turns out that Craig was the driver of my train!

Proof was of course needed, so here's a picture of the train arriving at the station as Craig was waving to me:Does this make me a trainspotter?

So I got onto the train and then came my claim to fame.

Wandering to my seat I saw someone who looked familiar, and it turns out it was none other than musician Paul Weller – who is now the third entry on my list of celebs I have been on Virgin Trains with (the others being Elvis Costello and David Moyes).

Just before we arrived at Euston Paul went to the gents and tripped over my size 13 feet - well, stumbled rather than tripped, so I didn't cause any cancelled gigs or anything!

Back to being surreal, Paul is of course well known for being from Woking … where I was travelling back to.

I didn't see him getting off the train though, so I can't comment on whether he was going underground :-)

What's your claim to fame?

Last week's funnies

2010-03-01T08:55:00.005Z

Am taking a week out and it's a good chance to catchup with life after the first couple of weeks in the customer experience team, and I thought I'd share a couple of things that made me laugh last week.

Towards the end of tying up the old role in the products team, I did some work with a company called Zeus Technology who provided some of the technology that supported our successful Google migrations - the last of which is starting soon and being ably taken over from me by my colleague Giorgi.

Last week they put out a press release about the partnership, which I was quoted in - and it is always odd seeing your own name come up in Google Alerts.

One automated Twitter bot (I presume) got slightly the wrong end of the stick though:I'd heard there was a gridiron player who shared my name, but looking at his picture from the link provided it's difficult to mix us up I think:Either way I've made it my Twitter profile picture for now. I'd heard of a rugby player and even an adult film actor with my name, hopefully I'll not be quoted as them in the weeks to come.

The other one that made me smile was the sight I saw when coming out of our Covent Garden offices on Friday night after a long week:I'm hoping that's not a new router for the network being delivered, as I'm sure the architecture team would fail it in testing!

Custcon 2010

2010-02-21T11:26:00.006Z

I've recently joined the customer experience team in Virgin Media, and one of the first things I got to do in the new role was to attend our customer conference, which this year was held near Leamington Spa.

The customer conference is an annual two day event where we get together with the customer facing areas of the business, the product teams and other areas that have a direct impact on our customers and celebrate what we've done in the last year as well as looking forward to what we're doing into the next year and further.

It was a brilliant event that I really enjoyed, and I definitely left it buzzing about all the great things that are coming up.

Our chief executive Neil Berkett kicked off the event by taking us through where we've got to and what the business' key priorities are for 2010 - and continuing to put the customers first is at the top of the list:After Neil we had one of the very best presentations I have ever seen, which was totally enthralling.

Stefan Osthaus is the VP of worldwide support and customer experience for Symantec, and walked us through how they had refocused their business and software development on the customer experience (including use of the same Net Promoter® system that we use within Virgin Media), and what results it's brought them so far as well as where they're taking it.

There was also lots of fascinating geeky 'under the hood' information about the Norton security products, and I hope I didn't bore him to death with subsequent questions!

It's certainly given me plenty of food for thought on things we should be doing.

In the afternoon we had some fascinating presentations from the product teams (even my old boss!) about what they are doing, and naturally everyone was excited about the TV presentation. I also learnt a lot more about mobile and fixed line phone, which no doubt I’ll find uses for. There was also a Q&A session with some of the senior team present.

In the evening it was time for our annual customer experience awards, where many of our senior team presented awards to some of the heroes around our business from the last year. The gala award went to one of our colleagues out in India who literally saved a customer's life by acting quickly when their behaviour suddenly changed while on the phone to us. Truly inspiring stuff and both standing ovations were totally deserved.

Day Two included further insight into how other companies are approaching customer experience - some of the things Starbucks are doing in the US were of particular interest to me - and we all got to try out some of our product install experiences and learn more about some of the customer facing teams in 'customer experience street.

However, I'm not sure my colleague Chi-Hong has much of a future as an installer:The day also featured a presentation from a group very close to me - our own Twitter team @virginmedia - on how they are helping customers out who contact us via Twitter and on how we use it proactively to find customers who need assistance.

We also heard from some more of our senior team about the plans for the rest of the year, and then it was time for the conference to wrap up with the various people present reflecting on their observations and making some resolutions about what we’ll all do to improve things for customers ahead of next year’s conference, which it is intended will be the biggest event yet in Virgin Media.

Digital Dorothy

2010-02-10T10:27:00.001Z

Ten years passes very quickly.

Valentine's Day in 2000 was a Monday, and it also marked the launch of what was then a revolutionary new service – unmetered dialup Internet from Telewest priced at £10 per month.

Reading back at some of the news stories about the launch really is a walk down memory lane, such as the quotes from the consumer managing director at the time, Philip Jansen:

"To date, operators have rationed the Internet by charging every minute. We're changing that, so it can now truly be the people's Net.

Freedom from worrying about cost will dramatically change the way people use the Net."

The launch was shortly after BT announced their own product branded 'Surftime' at £35 per month and two years after Freeserve had launched a 'free' dialup service – with them making their money from the telephony revenue instead.

Remember that at the time it was not uncommon for Internet users to be running up phone bills of £80 per month or more, and it was still a month before we launched the UK's first broadband service.

Our service had customers connected to a local dialup point of presence, where calls were routed to across our telephony network based on the customer's caller line ID.

And we were a victim of our own success in our doing things better than BT!

Customer demand was huge for the service and the voice switches just couldn't cope. Some customers were getting engaged or number unobtainable tones when trying to connect as well automated messages saying things like "sorry, there is a fault" and "the other person is cleared".

Some customers even got so familiar with the woman's voice on the automated messages that she was even dubbed 'Digital Dorothy' in our newsgroups!

A virtual team was quickly established and huge amounts of capacity were (at times almost literally) thrown into the voice network as well as on dialup racks (some of which are still in place), authentication platforms and elsewhere such as e-mail platforms.

Very quickly it was learnt who did the best work under pressure, and within 6 weeks the service had been stabilised and many of the team then focused on our broadband rollouts.

We learnt a lot from what happened at the time, such as the importance of detailed and thorough capacity planning and really understanding our customer experience, something that has stood us in good stead ever since. Oh, and we also very quickly created a dedicated service management function in our networks team!

And personally I always keep this on my desk to remind me of the lessons:

Spamtastic

2010-02-07T10:01:00.006Z

As one of the internal Virgin Media people who trialled the Google migration for @blueyonder.co.uk addresses before we started customer migrations, I had to un-link my Google Mail account from my blueyonder one (so my BY account would fill up with e-mail) - I've been aggregating my blueyonder mail in my Google inbox so I can get used to the Google experience ever since we started our migration project.

It's only this week that I remembered I hadn't linked them back up again - sorry to anyone I took ages in responding to accordingly!

I've been on the Internet with my blueyonder e-mail address for 10 years now (and my Cable Internet one of the same format before that), and plenty of spam bots have harvested the address through years of helping out customers on newsgroups, forums etc. I always try to post with a valid address so that people who don't understand 'munging' e-mail addresses can still get through to me.

So, when I used Mail Fetcher to aggregate my mail I got a flood of e-mail - mostly spam - come through.

As I tweeted yesterday, when all the mails flowed in I did some analysis of the spam sent to me, and it came out as:

41,782 messages correctly classified as spam (and put into my spam folder)
8 spam messages delivered to my Inbox (naturally I clicked on 'Report Spam' when I received these to help train my spam filter)
0 'false positive' messages in my spam folder that were genuine mail (as far as I know, only skim read the senders and subject lines)

I'm happy enough with that as a user, and it backs up my previous experience of the Google Mail spam filters, which are truly excellent.

The spam that's come through in the last few hours alone can be seen below:

[Click on image for a larger version]

Analysing the latest 52 spam messages in my Inbox (in retrospect I should probably have analysed the lot for a bigger sample before purging them yesterday) I can report the following pattern:

36 (69.23%) messages about medical products
7 (13.46%) in a foreign character set (no idea what they're about then)
3 (5.77%) Phishing mails
3 (5.77%) examples of 419 scams
2 (3.85%) general products spam
1 (1.92%) other scam

And I'd like to emphasise that I have never purchased or shown interest in such medical products!

blueyonder Completion (Google Update)

2010-02-05T18:36:00.000Z

Next week we'll effectively be finishing the second mass migration of customers to Google - @blueyonder.co.uk mailboxes – and in fact in many ways it's done already.

Other than about 300 mailboxes all ex-Telewest customers have now been moved to Google now, and are enjoying 7GB mailboxes (was 30MB on the old platform), search and chat features and more.

So how has it gone? Again, like the National migrations, very well. We got through the bulk of the mailbox migrations in around three weeks and we’re able to go as fast as 70K mailboxes per day – which is a sure fire sign that the contact centres were happy with how the migrations have gone.'

We’ve had a few issues along the way (as we would do with any migration of this size) – post migration 'welcome' mails being delayed in delivery to customers and some confusion with new help content going live for example – but generally it's gone very well and we've learned plenty from the migrations (as we did for National customers) that we'll be putting towards the upcoming migration of @ntlworld.com customers.

And that's going to be kicking off very soon. All the networks changes to make the migrations happen have started going in and there's been plenty of detailed data cleanup our brilliant IT team on the project have been working on. Once we've got our final production testing done and moved some staff mailboxes over as a trial we'll be onto customer migrations.

Not going to reveal any final dates yet as it depends on how the testing goes, but it's not far away! As with the other migrations we'll be writing to customers to keep them up to date with what's coming.

Once that's done we'll be giving customers on the 'old' domains the option (i.e. it will not be forced) to change to the @virginmedia.com format of e-mail addresses if they wish to and addressing customers who have 'weak' passwords that need to be changed so they will work on the Google platform in the longer term.

We're also starting to communicate to customers who need to change their e-mail software settings.

Once that's all done it'll be time for a damn good project team to be having a well earned rest and all!

E-mail help content - Attachment queries

2010-01-28T16:22:00.001Z

A few people asked why the list of attachments on our help pages that are disallowed differed from the one on the Google help content for Googlemail/Gmail, and some people even helped out with some testing of different attachment types - which was much appreciated.

We've looked into this with Google, and the answer is relatively simple. On the Google Apps platform (where our customer mailboxes are living as we migrate over to Google), the configuration is sometimes slightly different to what is on Googlemail/Gmail as Google tends to try things out (such as testing different type of attachment rules in this case) on their direct to users platform before rolling them out to partner instances - e.g. like they do with Google Labs.

In other words, our help content was incorrect and I'm in the middle of writing up a brief to get the help content updated.

So apologies for the inconvenience and it made sense when Google explained it to me!

Thanks to those who took the time to raise this one with us.

I've also posted this to our Help & Support forums.

blueyonder e-mail migration FAQ

2010-01-25T22:14:00.003Z

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to give us some feedback on the blueyonder migrations to Google so far.

We've now uploaded some answers to the most Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) which can be found here and are repeated below:

Note: In general this advice also applies to @virginmedia.com and @virgin.net e-mail addresses, although those customers have been on the Google platform for some time.

We recommend all customers use Webmail as their main way of accessing their e-mail as you can only access the advanced features of Virgin Media Mail like chat and the advanced search function via Webmail.

Why am I receiving old mails when migrated?

A fundamental goal of the migration is to try and ensure that emails present in the old mailboxes are migrated to the new mailboxes and that no email is lost during the migration process.

What we’ve found is that some email client software used by customers over the years has left some emails on the email servers by mistake when the email client software should have deleted them.

As it is impossible for us to identify all of the various email clients in use and their particular behaviour, these emails are also being moved to the new mailboxes to ensure that no emails are lost.

Also any emails previously sent using webmail are also being moved to the new mailboxes.

If you do not want these e-mails any longer, we suggest logging in to webmail and deleting them.

Do I need to make any changes to access my mail from multiple PC’s or devices?

This depends on how you’re accessing your email from multiple PC’s or devices.

If you are using POP (which most e-mail software is configured to use), or a combination of POP and webmail, to access your emails then you need to enable something called recent: mode on all the PC’s or devices (e.g. mobile phones) where you are using POP to access your email so that any emails received in the last 30 days can be seen from them all.

More information on this can be found on our help pages and in this forum sticky post.

If you are using IMAP, or a combination of IMAP and webmail, on all of the PC’s or devices then you should not have to change anything.

If you are using a combination of POP and IMAP then we would recommend configuring all the PC’s or devices to use IMAP where possible. If your device does not support IMAP then configure POP for that device with recent: mode as described above.

If you are using webmail on multiple devices or machines, you don't need to enable recent: mode or make any other settings changes.

Do I need to change any other settings in my email client software?

Not right now. While we’ve added additional email security features with new settings to use on the new platform your old settings will continue to work for now.

The new security settings will be required later, but we’ll be in touch with more information before that happens and a tool that’ll make the changes for you if you want.

You can take advantage of the new security features now if you want, you just need to switch to the new settings detailed in this forum sticky post.

If you need help with your settings remember there are plenty of step-by-step guides in our knowledge base.

Why am I seeing e-mails disappearing?

This is normally a symptom caused by accessing your mailbox from multiple PC’s or devices.

Check the 'Do I need to change any other settings in my email client software?‘ FAQ answer above for the changes you need to make to stop this happening.

Why am I getting an error when trying to login?

In the last year we’ve been standardising the way all Virgin Media Internet customers log in to My Virgin Media to simplify the process for everyone.

Previously blueyonder.co.uk customers have been able to log in using any email address (email alias) associated with a mailbox. Now the primary email address of that mailbox must be used to login to My Virgin Media and webmail.

If you are not sure of what the primary e-mail address on your mailbox is, there is a tool that will help you find this on the Webmail login page. The tool can also be accessed here.

Note that this email address can also be used to login to POP or IMAP as the Username configured in an email client. This is the recommended setting for this although the existing Username configured in your email client will continue to work until we require some additional new security settings to be used at some point in the future. We’ll be contacting you at that point with more information about this, along with a tool that will make the required changes for you if you wish.

If you want to take advantage of the new additional security features right now you can modify you current settings to the new settings. Details of the new settings can be found in this forum sticky post.

If you need help with your email software, remember there are plenty of step-by-step guides in our knowledge base.

If you are using the correct e-mail address and still having problems accessing your e-mail from Webmail (and any e-mail software) you might want to try resetting your password in My Virgin Media to see if that helps.

What if the primary email address of the mailbox isn’t the one that I want to use?

Unfortunately you can’t change this right now as Google only introduced a capability to change the primary mailbox address quite recently and we are still looking into how to best implement this for our customers.

If you are using webmail to send and receive emails you can however ensure that the email address you use to send and receive emails is set to your primary email address by selecting the “Account” option in Webmail settings and selecting your primary email address as the default “Send mail as:” address.

How do I turn off the spam filter?

The Google platform has advanced spam filtering which will pick up the vast majority of junk mail, but you will need to tune the filter for your mailbox to maximise its effectiveness (so that it knows what you consider to be spam and not spam).

You do this by accessing your mailbox via Webmail and clicking on the 'Report Spam' button for mail in your inbox that you consider to be junk mail. Similarly you should also periodically check the 'Spam' folder in Webmail and click on the 'Not Spam' button for any e-mails you consider to be genuine.

If you already have a preferred anti-spam system configured on your email client and want to use this instead of the advanced Google anti-spam system you can do so by using the filter settings in webmail.

The instructions on how to do this are here, and the filter you need is:

Matches: is:spam
Do this: Never send it to Spam

When setting up this particular filter a warning message will be displayed. In this instance the warning message should be ignored as it is not applicable for this particular filter.

Once configured, this filter setting will continue to deliver spam to the inbox of your email client software where it can then be handled by your existing anti-spam system.

How can I set up another blueyonder.co.uk mailbox?

Once your existing mailboxes have been migrated to the new Google platform any new mailboxes created by you will be @virginmedia.com mailboxes rather than @blueyonder.co.uk mailboxes.

We’ve also increased the number of individual mailboxes that you can create from 5 to 10.

Why are there three screens before I get to my Webmail

While the blueyonder.co.uk accounts are being migrated to the new platform we need an additional step in place during the Webmail login process. This is required so to ensure that you access your email at the old platform or the Google one dependent on whether you have been migrated or not.

Once the migration process has been completed, this additional step will be removed as this check will no be longer required.

Why are messages still on the server even though I have deleted them with my e-mail software?

Messages are now kept on the server by default so that these can also be accessed from Webmail if the user wishes to do so. With the storage allocation of mailboxes having been increased from 30MB to 7GB the previous default behaviour of deleting emails to avoid filling up mailboxes is no longer required.

If you wish to change this default behaviour, login to Webmail, choose ‘Settings’ and then ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’. In the ‘POP Download’ section, option number 2 has a dropdown menu in it. Select ‘delete Virgin Media’s copy’ and save the setting. However please bear in mind that if you choose this option the only emails you will have access to in your inbox in Webmail will be the ones that you have not downloaded to your PC or other device.

Alternately, if you are accessing your mailbox from multiple PC’s or devices and are using the recent: setting, this will keep your emails on the server for 30 days making them accessible from multiple PC’s and devices.

Why is an e-mail put in the bin folder of Webmail when I delete it from my e-mail software?

The bin folder is the equivalent of a “deleted items” or “trash” folder in email clients. Deleted items are placed in the bin folder to make them accessible from webmail or from e-mail software using the IMAP method of accessing the mailbox. Emails are automatically deleted from the bin folder 30 days after having been placed there.

Why does an e-mail stay in the ‘All Email’ folder when I delete it from my e-mail software?

This behaviour is specific to use of IMAP within email clients. Further details on this behaviour can be found here.

To fully delete the message in IMAP drag the message from the All Mail folder into the bin folder, delete it (will appear with strike through) and then purge the folder using the purge option (e.g. ‘Empty Deleted Items’) of your email software.

When do I get migrated to Google?

Many customers have already been moved to the Google platform, but those who have not done so yet (with @blueyonder.co.uk addresses) will be moved over coming weeks.

Customers with @ntlworld.com e-mail addresses will be moved over to Google when we’ve finished the blueyonder.co.uk migration. We will be writing to these customers with more information ahead of them being moved to the Google platform.

Can I use the name I use in my e-mail address with @virginmedia.com as well?

At the moment you cannot use the name you use in your email address with @virginmedia.com as well.

While any new e-mail addresses created end with @virginmedia.com, we have 'reserved' any existing names used in email addresses in the three 'old' e-mail domains so that they cannot be allocated to any other customer.

For example, if the name richard.branson existed in the @blueyonder.co.uk domain no new customer would be able to use the same name ending in @virginmedia.com, as it is allocated for Richard to use it should he decide to when we offer this opportunity later this year.

If the name exists in more than one domain – e.g. if the name richard.branson also exists in the @virgin.net domain – both address owners will be given an equal opportunity to have the address allocated to them.

We will be writing to customers with more information on this once the @ntlworld.com migration to Google has been completed.

In the meantime if you try to get new names ending @virginmedia.com that are the same as your name in one of the ‘old’ e-mail domains in My Virgin Media you will see a message saying the name has already been taken.

When I can use my email name with @virginmedia.com will the @blueyonder.co.uk address still work?

Yes, you will still be able to use the old @blueyonder.co.uk email address to receive emails into the associated @virginmedia.com mailbox. Note that the new @virginmedia.com email address will be the one used to login to the mailbox.

Virgin Media Mail Update - 300K in

2010-01-19T17:10:00.003Z

Today we've migrated the 300,000th @blueyonder.co.uk mailbox to the Google platform, meaning we are a good way through the second of our e-mail migrations – Virgin Media National customers with @virgin.net e-mail addresses already having been migrated, and customers with @ntlworld.com addresses being next. Oh, and of course new customers have been on the Google platform with @virginmedia.com e-mail addresses for some time.

So how is it going? Actually pretty well. We started off small, quickly moved to migrating 50,000 mailboxes a day onto Google and are now talking about going even faster – which is actually over and above what our plan was!

With something this massive there's always a risk of problems, but thankfully we've had hardly any issues and the majority of calls that came in were customers looking for general assistance on how the new webmail works and some account enquiries as to how to access the new platform.

So in short we're generally very happy in how things are going. Our technical support teams are getting some really good feedback, and we hope customers are enjoying the 7GB mailboxes, the new chat and search features and the massively improved webmail interface that's integrated into our site's single sign on.

I spent 3 days with our technical support team last week to help out with any questions and queries they were having as well as to see some of the direct feedback coming in from our customers – and here's the team helping them out in Liverpool if anyone's interested:
We're expecting the first pass of all blueyonder.co.uk mailbox migrations to finish within the next 2-3 weeks, and to have cleaned up any outstanding mailboxes in February.

We've also found a few bugs and issues since we started the migrations, and it's worth an update on what we've found out and what we're doing about them.

Some of them have already been fixed – such as one causing intermittent errors when sending mails – and what we're working on right now is:

Occasional errors when using IMAP to access your mailbox. Service is usually restored on a retry, but we're working on a fix.
Webspace renaming errors – a coding fix is being developed for this
Inability to delete aliases – a fix is also being developed for this
Attachment rules on help pages being inconsistent with what appears to be the behaviour in live – we're checking these out with Google

The most common issue reported is some customers reporting old e-mails being redelivered when they are migrated to Google. From looking into this, the cause appears to be IMAP folders that have become unsubscribed (but are still present in a user's mailbox, hence the mail is migrated to Google) which is either down to the software used or changes the user has made to their setup within that software.

At present the team are working on identifying the pattern of this further, but it's quite intricate and is down to third party software used by some customers rather than the migration process itself – we're seeing what we can do to limit the impact of this though, without impacting 'genuine' mail naturally!

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to feedback so far.

Snowme Working

2010-01-08T18:00:00.003Z

It's been a very cold week, and where I am (Surrey) both Debz and I have been snowed in since Tuesday and home working. Here's what the snow was like at lunchtime (yes, it was that dark) when we ventured out for a short walk on Wednesday:At least there's been a very warm Westie to keep the feet warm when on the laptop on the sofa though!

PlusNet have reported an increase in VPN (Virtual Private Network) traffic - and we've also seen noticeably more home working going on this week across our broadband network (as we saw during February's snowfall), with around a 17% increase in traffic during working hours coming from consumer connections.

Our business division this week advocated businesses having contingency plans to support additional levels of home working in cases like this, and we've been practicing what we preach with (on Wednesday) 2,400 of our staff members home working remotely via our Citrix server farm - three times more than normal levels.

Speaking of which, I can't escape the Excel spreadsheet I need to work on any longer! I hope everyone has a warm weekend.

The second Google migration

2010-01-06T12:21:00.000Z

Happy New Year everyone.

This morning we made the 'go' call to kick off the second migration of customers' mailboxes to the Virgin Media Mail (Google) platform, those customers with @blueyonder.co.uk e-mail addresses.

Before Christmas we did an internal staff trial – with 85% of respondents finding it to be an improvement on the previous platform – and have now worked through all the feedback, resolved a couple of minor bugs and closed down the trial as a success.

On Monday we sent the first batch of pre-migration e-mails to over 500K customers (the rest of the mails go out next week) to inform them of the pending migration, what will change and to link off to the help pages – and today we move the first 1,000 customer mailboxes over to the Google platform. Customers also get a 'welcome' e-mail once their mailbox has been moved onto Google.

Last year we launched Virgin Media Mail for new customers and completed the first of our three migrations (for customers with @virgin.net e-mail addresses), leaving us to complete the remainder of the migrations (@ntlworld.com customers will follow the blueyonder migration) and to launch the 'Domain Change', where we will give existing customers the opportunity to adopt the @virginmedia.com style of e-mail addresses if they want to.

Also keep an eye out for some great new help videos about e-mail over coming weeks. We hope they will help guide customers through the Google experience when needed – customers seem to really like it once they're using it!

Millennium Bug memories

2009-12-31T11:36:00.004Z

It's quite amazing to think that it was ten years ago today that we were all getting ready for the Millennium Bug to hit, watching news reports coming in from Tonga, my native New Zealand and other places ahead of the UK in terms of time to see what had (or, as it turned out to be the case, not) broken.

At the time I was working as the webmaster for Telewest, responsible for building and deploying our web server estate along with the sites that ran on them (everything from web design to web server configuration), and it's fair to say that the Bug came as a distraction.

In December 1999 we were gearing up for the launch of the UK's first commercial broadband service - blueyonder - which we went to market with on March 31, 2000 (we brought it forward a day just in case!) and were doing the final testing of all the systems that would support it, as well as building servers and websites. The first version of the blueyonder website can be found here thanks to the Wayback Machine:

I'd also just moved house and got my superfast (not) ISDN line installed so I could work from home, so it really was a completely manic time.

Come the night in question we had a whole team of engineers and other tecchies on call in case of problems, and I remember spending the millennium moment itself logged into our Apache servers checking configuration and refreshing web pages to check they were still working.

On reflection, we spent a lot of time and money upgrading systems in the latter half of 1999 and that probably contributed to the event itself being smooth along with all the preparation for the day - when we also had plenty of additional helpdesk staff in should customers have been experiencing problems.

One man though went well beyond all others in his confidence that there would be no impact - my colleague (and, at the time, boss) Fergal Butler, who decided to spend the millennium holidaying in Cuba - one place where missiles were bound to launch against if the US defence systems did have a problem!

Google Phase 3

2009-12-24T10:57:00.002Z

Having now launched Google e-mail for new Virgin Media customers and successfully migrated the whole National base with @virgin.net e-mail addresses over to the Google platform (which has generally gone very well), the e-mail unification team are now onto the next phase of the project – moving the ex-Telewest cable customers with @blueyonder.co.uk e-mail addresses over to the Google platform.

As we're now in the Christmas/New Year change freeze, the migrations are set to start as soon as we’re back in the New Year - and in the meantime we've completed the staff trial ahead of the start of the migrations.

We found a couple of minor issues that the team are fixing but as with the National staff trial things went very well and the overall feedback summary is probably the most interesting of the results:

As you’d expect not everybody loves change, but generally it's all gone very well and we've closed the trial as a success.

Once the ex-Telewest migrations are completed the team are then full speed ahead to complete the ex-NTL ones (customers with @ntlworld.com e-mail addresses) and to launch the ‘domain change’, which lets customers adopt a @virginmedia.com address from one of the old style ones if they wish to.

So it's going to be a busy start to 2010! I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Spam survey

2009-12-20T11:39:00.004Z

Earlier in the year we were invited by ENISA (the European Network and Information Security Agency) - an agency of the European Union - to take part in their 2009 spam survey, where they were surveying ISPs and other companies across the continent about spam, what is done to stop it and the effect it has on customers and providers alike.

We were happy to do so, given the measures we have already deployed across our various platforms to counter spam.

The measures vary at this point in time as we're in a transitional period, with some customers on the Google platform (those with @virginmedia.com and @virgin.net e-mail addresses), some on the Openwave platform (@ntlworld.com) and some on the Exim/Microsoft platform (@blueyonder.co.uk) but all are unifying onto the same technology as we move our e-mail provision to Google, which completes next year.

We've spent quite a lot on the measures in place on our own network, and do drop a heck of a lot of e-mail as spam and viruses - well over 9 out of 10 e-mails usually don't get into customer inboxes as they are not genuine mails.

This is very much a pattern common across the continent going by the survey results:The survey reports only 5% of e-mail gets as far as user inboxes, showing both how effective anti spam measures there are and just how much spam there is. Imagine if your mailbox has 20 times the mails already in it if anti spam measures were turned off!

The results of the study can be found here if anyone fancies a read.

Hectic Times

2009-12-10T11:48:00.005Z

It's been a really full on couple of weeks as everyone tries to close down the things they need to get done before they go on their Christmas breaks.

Personally I've got this week off instead, which is giving me a good chance to recharge my batteries.

Our staff trial is underway for the next phase of the Google migrations, with customers having @blueyonder.co.uk e-mail addresses being the next to move over to the Google Apps platform.

As we're about to hit the annual change freeze, we'll start moving customers over from early January and all going well we'll be onto moving customers with @ntlworld.com addresses onto Google in no time - but we have a few data cleanse tasks to do first, which are happening in parallel with the blueyonder trial and migrations.

The good news is that customers we have already moved over to Google (with @virgin.net e-mail addresses) continue to track well with regards to key measures like faults and customer satisfaction, and we'll be doing some further research to talk to some of these customers (likely early in the new year now) to see what we can learn to make the migration process even smoother for the next customers to be moved to Google.

Over the last few weeks I've spent a day with our customer service guys in Manchester, including meeting our wonderful Twitter team for the first time:Pete, Billy, Sam and Gareth are doing great work helping our customers out over at @virginmedia.

While in Manchester the broadband product reliability team (i.e. the wider cross-functional group working on service improvement initiatives) got a lot of call monitoring done to pick up some nuggets of things to look into and we also held an intensive 2 day workshop with our technical support guys in Liverpool to look at connectivity faults and how we can improve things like toolsets - which is set to keep me out of trouble for the rest of the year and much of the early part of 2010 I expect!

There's some detailed analysis going on to look into sample accounts reporting connectivity problems and see what we can do to prevent them happening - although when you consider that something like half of all connectivity problems are down to PCs (software & hardware) it's a bit more of a challenge, but one that we're happy to take on.

If I don't get a chance to blog earlier, I'd like to wish compliments of the season to all.

Spanners!

2009-11-29T08:47:00.006Z

Anyone who has ever unscrewed the cable from their TV set top box or their cable modem - say when redecorating or moving the device - may have actually caused some issues that will affect their service if they have not tightly re-connected it afterwards.

For this reason, we are in the process of trialling something we are internally calling 'Project Spanner'.

As the name suggests, Project Spanner is all about sending a spanner to customers who we think might be experiencing problems due to their connections not being sufficiently tightened and asking them to ensure that they tighten them.

The spanners look like this:
As modelled by me recently in our London offices.

Customers who we are sending the spanners to are also be given instructions on how to use them - which is important, as over tightening the connection (say, by using your own spanner) can also damage the connectors and cause problems.

Phishing alert

2009-11-13T10:45:00.005Z

We get phishing attempts all the time targeting our customer's mailboxes with fraudulent mails, and the latest one that's come in today is shown below:

Subject: Blueyonder Warning Alert !!!
From: Blueyonder Mail Administrator

==============================

Dear Account User

This Email is from Blueyonder Mail Administrator and we are sending it to every Blueyonder Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Blueyonder accounts so we are shutting down some Blueyonder accounts and your account was among those to be deleted. We are sending this email to you so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name, password, date of birth and your country inforBlueyonderion would be needed to verify your account.

Due to the congestion in all Blueyonder users and removal of all unused Blueyonder Accounts, Blueyonder would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login InforBlueyonderion below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.

* Username: ..............................
* Password: ................................
* Date of Birth: ............................
* Alternative Email .........................
* Country Or Territory: ................

After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interruBlueyondered and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences.

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Sincerely,

Blueyonder Mail Administrator

When we get attacks like this we do what we can to block as many inbound e-mails as possible and contact the source provider where the attack emanates from to get them to do what they can to stop them.

Now that we're well in the process of migrating customers over to Google we will also be giving to our customers even more phishing and spam protection than we have on the legacy platforms.

For clarity, we'll never e-mail customers asking them to divulge this kind of information via e-mail, and we advise anyone to double check any links in an e-mail before clicking on them. If you're not certain, then don't.

One down, two to go

2009-10-24T14:13:00.004+01:00

This week we hit a major milestone on our project to move our ISP e-mail services over to the Google Apps platform - the completion of the first migration to Google.

To recap, all new Virgin Media customers setting up e-mail with us have been put onto the Google platform (with @virginmedia.com e-mail addresses) for some time, and this week's completion of the first migration means that all National (ADSL) customers with @virgin.net addresses now have their mailboxes on the Google platform too.

This means that customers have much bigger mailboxes, as well as access to features such as chat and search within the webmail interface. Customers have been moved over without any change to their e-mail address (they will be able to choose a @virginmedia.com address at a later date if they wish to) - this is just a change of the platform.

The biggest challenge we have expected (and planned for) within the migrations is how customers will react to what is a very different webmail interface from what they were on previously, and we have focused our help and customer communications around this, as well as training up our technical support teams on what some of the most common queries would be.

So far we have seen what we expected, with some 80% (well, 81.23% to be precise) of the calls we've had classified in this 'customer education' category as it is known internally. In short, this means helping customers out with how to use the service, where things are, what they are called and the likes.

The remainder of the calls have been in a number of different categories - password resets, some of the data integrity work we had to do (which involved some customer communications to anyone affected) and a couple of the minor bugs we found and have plans to resolve ahead of the next migration if not already resolved.

The learning curve for using the Google service seems to be around 2-3 weeks for customers migrating to it (and I recall it taking me a couple of weeks to get used to it) going by the enquiries we've handled (Day 0 = day customer was migrated to Google):

[Click for a larger version, scale removed as commercially sensitive]

We had actually planned for it to take around four weeks, so we're ahead of expectations.

In fact we're ahead of expectations generally - the National migration finished 8 days early and all the work is now happening ahead of the next migration, ex-Telewest customers with @blueyonder.co.uk e-mail addresses. In fact the team are already talking about the National migration in the past tense!

This weekend a number of technical changes are happening, that enable us to move into some final production testing and then a staff trial ahead of the migrations starting, which is due to happen this side of Christmas and run into next year, when the ex-NTL customers (with @ntlworld.com e-mail addresses) will also move over to Google.

Now that we're a good chunk of the way through the 6m mailboxes we are moving to Google and it's going well, it's full steam ahead on the next phase. A big thanks to the exceptional work from our project team, and also to those customers who have taken the time to give us feedback already.