Openreach (OR) have provided an update due to the severe weather conditions; this is likely to increase call volumes and impact handling times. The following update (week ending 28th September) is a direct communication from OR.
We have measures in place to prioritise certain customers’ issues such as elderly or vulnerable people and vital services such as doctor surgeries; however we ask for your patience while we work with Openreach to manage this exceptional situation as effectively as possible. Please be aware that this is a situation that is impacting the whole industry, and is not specific to TalkTalk.
“At 14.00 today we issued a MBORC declaration for all our repair activities in the SOM patches below:
- Durham & Tees Valley
- York
- Bradford & the Dales
- Leeds & West Yorkshire
- South Yorkshire and Chesterfield
- North Lincoln
- Cumbria
- North Manchester
- South Manchester
- Merseyside
- Lancashire
- Derby & Nottingham
- Leicester
- Birmingham & Black Country
- Mid Wales & Shrewsbury
- North Wales
- Stoke & Chester
- NE Scotland
- Central Scotland
- SE Scotland
- Aylesbury
- Northampton
- Southampton
We entered the weekend with c16,000 jobs in the repair stack, which is within our standard operating range, in addition, with over 120,000 completions last week capacity had been created in many areas to focus on provision.
This means we were able to reduce UK average lead times from c25 working days to c22 last week as a result of this performance.
However with fault intake rates spiking in the early part of this week (14 per cent higher than planned nationwide), reflecting the damaging downpours and flooding of the weekend and early part of the week, this has taken the fault repair stack to 25,500 early this morning.
The additional engineers that are starting to join as a result of the recruitment and resourcing decisions we made earlier in the summer, will continue to be deployed on provision work. However, we will need to temporarily direct some of our installation capacity towards repair in order to clear this increase in faults your customers are experiencing.”
