We all work in the UK contact centre industry – we all know how it works and we all know that the ‘customer experience’ is key to a successful and profitable contact centre.
What happens when things do wrong? What happens when the customer experience principle fails miserably and indeed your call wasn’t really important as you once thought?
Imagine telephoning an insurance company, as they took an unauthorised amount from the company bank account, at 10.24am on a busy Monday Morning, 25th March 2024.
Having gone through the normal channels of pressing 2 for customer services I was put on hold with the obligatory ‘your call is important to us’ and ‘we are experiencing a high volume of calls.’ I was eventually put trough the Customer Services after being on hold for over 15 minutes. (hasn’t this contact centre heard of WFM from injixo?)
It was clear that the contact centre agent was not using noise cancelling headsets as I could clearly hear what the agent’s colleague was doing for their lunch break. Haven’t they heard of Jabra headsets?
It was suggested that I could change the policy online but was not able to do so as I did not have a policy with the insurance company – in addition it was suggested that I use their chat service via their website using the /livechat. Regrettably that particular webpage did not exist.
Having spoken to an agent who could not resolve the matter I request to be put through to Credit Control – a further 7 minutes on hold ensued.
I requested that an email be sent to me as confirmation that the refund would happen today and not the 7/10 days as originally advised by the agent.
I received an email with the requested attachment confirming the refund – Great but it was for the wrong amount, wrong policy details and indeed the wrong person; more worrying was that the email attachment gave full details of another person to include their banking details!
We all know that contact centres are busy places – we all know that things to go wrong – but contact centres are probably one of the most technically advanced industries in the UK so there should no excuses.
Being on the telephone to a UK based contact centre for over 30 minutes is simply not acceptable.
Initially I was tempted to name and shame the contact centre in question – but after due consideration I have decide not to based on Principle….
Watch this apace
The Editor
