According to Ventia Tasmanian Supervisor Justin Roberts, keeping people connected and fixing issues as soon as possible is just part of his team's role. However, in the current COVID-19 environment, they are well aware that many more people rely on their NBN service more than ever before.
"In the back of your mind you know that people are relying on their connections now as much as ever," Justin said.
Recently Justin's colleague, Justin James (yes, another Justin), was called to a job in the northern suburbs of Hobart. The resident had been experiencing some frustration in not being able to work from home due to his connection being down.
The request came in towards the end of the day however with some daylight left in the day Justin decided to head out to see if he could identify the issue straight away.
"We didn't want to leave it until the following morning, knowing this was someone who was trying to work from home," Justin said.
They were able to identify the issue, request the required approval from nbn and have the customer connected the next day, ahead of schedule. Whilst the team said this was just part of the job, for the customer, it was an example of great service.
"Justin was friendly, took his time to talk to us and was mindful to take the long way around my property to not wake my kids AND showed up the next day ahead of schedule. Great service and was a huge relief to us," the customer said in an email.
Justin said that whilst the team are always striving to connect people as quickly as possible, it's still nice to hear positive customer feedback.
"This is our job and we do it numerous times per week but if something needs repairing, we know that there's a lot of people working from home at the moment who need us to fix it quickly," he said.
"We had a job recently where there were 180 people whose connection was knocked out, so we knew it was critical to get them back online as soon as possible which we were able to do the same day.'
"The close relationship we have with nbn here in Tasmania allows us to work together and make this sort of thing happen. Yes it's our job and yes it is what we do a lot of but it's still nice to get good feedback."