Spark says today it is ramping up its customer service teams to deal with an unprecedented demand from customers for fibre broadband services over the ultra-fast broadband (UFB) network. From today, Spark will also publish information online about its Customer Service Centre performance, to help customers choose the best way and the best time to contact Spark.

Over the past couple of months, Spark has steadily boosted the number of staff on the front line and it intends to recruit another 100 customer service agents over the next 12 weeks.

In an average month Spark’s main call centres handle around 11,000 hours of work per week. In August of this year, that jumped 34 percent to 15,000 hours per week. The increase was primarily driven by calls about fibre installations.

Spark is recruiting agents to work across all its customer service teams, while ensuring customers can access help and information over digital channels if that’s what they prefer. In the past few weeks Spark has increased the size of its Live Chat team, which now operates 24/7. It has also set up an online Fibre Hub, which provides a one-stop-shop for all the information customers need about their fibre installation. Around 50 Spark staffers have been pulled off their day jobs to focus on processing fibre orders, and improving the fibre process and customer experience.

Spark is today taking steps to be more transparent with customers about its Customer Service Centre performance. In what is believed to be an industry first for New Zealand, this involves putting an online dashboard on its website, which shows call volumes and service metrics such as wait times. The dashboard will be updated hourly to give customers a near-real time view of how quickly they can get hold of Spark through different channels.