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Customer Service Plan
Openreach recognises that from time to time, customers experience serious issues which require our urgent assistance to resolve. Accordingly, the Directors Service Office (DSO) will deal with the most critical cases that satisfy the DSO criteria, by providing designated referral officers direct access to a small team that are empowered to step outside of normal processes, when required. The team is closely allied to the office of the Managing Director of Service Delivery and will take ownership for handling these issues within Openreach.
If we have failed a previous engineer commitment and your case does not meet the required DSO criteria, it is mandatory that you escalate within CSM or regrettably we cannot help. In order to accept your case without any delay it is imperative that you highlight why the case is business critical or brand damaging and ensure the supporting evidence is attached, otherwise this will result in the case being rejected and ultimately delay fault/order resolution.
The most common rejection reasons include no Brand Damage (BD) evidence attached such as;
o MP
o Ofcom
o Press/Media
o Legal/Trading standards
o Company directors
Your referral to the DSO team must satisfy one of the below criteria.
Once you’ve completed the online form you’ll be taken to a page to attach evidence. This attachment, along with the information you input on the form will be used to validate that your case meets the DSO Criteria.
The DSO must serve all CPs in a fair and equal way. To do this our criteria sets out when we can help, your evidence validates that your case meets the criteria.
Types of Evidence
· Email or letter from an MP/MSP to a CP specifically about the same fault or order on your DSO referral
· Email chains showing the high-level impact and damage to CP brand
· Full details of any financial impact to you or a business customer with full figures and justification
· Copy of a story already featured in the press or email evidence of press contact showing a clear intent to run a story
o The escalation process in the Customer Service Plan should be followed as we do have other escalation points within Openreach that should be utilised before any approach to the DSO
o The DSO has no capability to raise or amend orders. The team can only assist if there is an open/live committed order or fault
o Once reported these faults will automatically be managed with the maximum amount of focus and speed. Intervention from DSO could possibly cause a delay
o The DSO do not have the resources to deal with multiple orders/projects. The DSO can only manage up to 4 orders per DSO case for the same customer at the same location. Furthermore, only a single DSO case can be raised per customer, any duplicate requests will be rejected
These changes make it much clearer on what should be addressed to the DSO and will help to ensure that the DSO can apply the necessary focus on the most appropriate cases. CPs should continue to use existing escalation channels in the Customer Service Plan for all other work. Your support on this important change is appreciated.
We have a dedicated CP Portal located in the ‘My Tools’ section of ‘My Dashboard’ on the Openreach portal:
http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/customerzone/loadMyDashboard.do
This is accessible to registered Referral Officers from each CP (see below for details of who can use the DSO Service). The portal allows you to enter a DSO case and then electronically submits this to the DSO team. A unique case reference will be returned to you and shortly after that your case handler will make contact with you. Please note there will be additional validation to ensure the case meets the DSO criteria.
If you are unhappy with the way your case is being handled or progressed please use the following escalation path. Please note these details must not be given to members of the public.
Escalation Level |
Name |
|
Timeframe for response |
|
First Level |
DSO Manager |
|
4 working hours |
|
Second Level |
Zahid Afzal |
|
2 working Hours |
|
Third Level |
Daniel Corker |
|
2 working Hours |
In order that business critical issues can still be raised, where there is an Openreach portal system failure, the following contingency process has been arranged.
To enable rapid pick up of a DSO issue after 19:00 and at weekends we would ask that you call 0800 432 0582 Option 3 in addition to submitting your request on the portal. This will ensure that our on-call manager is alerted.
Each Communications Provider should agree a list of designated representatives who are authorised to pass issues into the DSO.
To register a DSO referral officer, please contact dso.referral.officer.list@openreach.co.uk
· It operates 7 days a week 24/7.
· We are a stand-alone escalation point and are not associated with Openreach CSM who deal with recovery of date commitment failure in Openreach.
· We may need to raise charges for out of hours work – we will agree these with you in advance.
· We can only accept cases from agreed CP Referral Officers.
· To ensure that you’re getting the most effective service, we monitor your usage and share these files with our business integrity team. We expect usage to be proportional to your working system size. If we think that you are sending a disproportional amount of cases we will advise your Customer Experience Manager to address this.
The process is ONLY to be used when:
To raise a case please follow the DSO Contingency Process ensuring that your referral includes the following information:
For call barring or TOS orders placed in this way, the barring or TOS will remain active until a further request to remove the barring is received by the DSO.