Derek McManus, Chief Operating Officer, shares O2s plan for its network, in order to rebuild the confidence of our customers

 

Following the network disruption that affected some customers last week (http://o2-news.staging.repubdev.com/?p=3833), I wanted to share our plan to improve the stability of our network and rebuild confidence in O2.

 

First, let me say we are extremely disappointed to have let our customers down again. Two network faults in a short space of time is unsatisfactory. We took important steps with our supplier after the outage in July to prevent a similar fault happening again, and while this issue was not on the same scale, it did impact our customers. Despite industry-leading technology and major investment in our network, we recognise we need to take immediate action to address this specific problem:

 

1) We are removing the Central User Database provided by one of our suppliers, which has suffered two different faults in the last few months. We are not prepared to risk this happening to our customers for a third time and are implementing a proven alternative solution.

 

2) We will be committing an additional spend of £10 million on this change, and will also continue to invest £1.5m a day on building out and improving our network.

 

3) We are up-weighting and re-focussing our Service Experience Team to be solely dedicated to ensuring the highest level of customer network experience while we go through this period of unprecedented investment, culminating in the delivery of our 4G service.  Their performance will now be measured on customers’ confidence in our network.

 

While we recognise that we have dented the confidence and trust of some of our customers, I hope this plan will demonstrate our commitment to rebuilding that trust. We will not rest until we have cemented the stability of our network and can deliver the level of service customers have come to expect of us over the last ten years.

 

At O2, the experience of our customers governs and determines everything we do. It is no accident that we have established ourselves as the benchmark for customer satisfaction with the fewest complaints of any network as determined by the regulator, Ofcom. We are determined to live up to that in the eyes of our customers.

 

As such, the continual improvement of our network and the strive for excellence in customer experience is our focus, and will be a topic that I and my colleagues will be continuing to talk about with customers over the coming weeks.

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