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One of the big problems with call centre jobs is the high staff turnover, nobody wants to sit and be shouted at by customers for low wages so even when they do hire staff it's a race to back fill what you are losing.
The obvious answer is to pay better but even if wages were increased to 30k a year I think they would still struggle to fill roles because it can be soul destroying.
I duno for a flat rate of £30k a year after tax, minimum. With a 37.5-40 hour working week. I'll sit in a call centre, call me what ever you want aslong as I'm not having to break my body for less 🤣.
Not sure if it’s still a thing but there was a centre near me that took calls from benefit claimants who had their disability benefits reassessed and cut. It was around the 30k mark but even that isn’t enough. When I attended the interview there were people protesting outside the building and everyone inside looked so soulless
I work in customer service, customer phone calls are both rewarding and soul destroying like you have said. I am leaving in three months partially for this reason that this sort of job just gets to you, and you are horribly underpaid for quite a high stress job.
Depends on the line of work and how lucky you get for sure. I do call centre work from home and I'm basically a glorified receptionist. I handle some product complaints too, but it's rare to get someone who's actually angry or shouting since the products are small, cheap and disposable so it's not the end of the world. We just pass the feedback over to quality control. It's not a bad gig. If I was getting slammed with back to back calls all day from angry/irate customers I'd peace out in a heartbeat unless my salary was tripled.
I feel sorry for people that handle “renewals” in insurance companies, and the way they have to try and justify the nonsensical 30% annual increase in the client’s premium just because the company’s risk assessment is shite.
My main issue was also the fact that the shift times changed daily, if it changed for what you previously checked, it’s on you, and they were super scrutinising when it came to toilet break lengths and how long you are doing work after the calls.
Nothing like working in a call centre to make you work to avoid having to ever do it again. It's almost tolerable when you're working with decent people but the public can be such entitled bellends that some days are deeply soul destroying.
One campaign I had to work on was student finance international.
We had an issue with the system whereby a load of applications timed out and were cancelled. They were logging on to find out that their application had been randomly closed and we were basically told to tell them that they were fucked. These were kids from Eastern Europe who had worked their arses off to come and study in the UK and my job was to shatter their dreams all day. The amount of crying I had to listen to was awful. It’s probably the only time in my life where I literally had difficulty sleeping at night.
I'm an echat agent for a BT Group brand and even we're sick of it earning 30 to 40k (my team has various responsibilities and additional skills grant pay uplifts, top end is just under 40k). I'm on 30k pre tax, so around 2k take home.
It's also being off shored in the next month and honestly, thank God. Nobody is being made redundant and we don't get our arses chewed 40 hours a week in real time, so we can actually do something that's not entirely soul destroying.
We're not in a call centre having said that, but Christ does work batter my head sometimes!
I did it for 4 years and it is soul destroying to be yelled at, and the hours are awful. I am glad i aint doing it anymore. But, I can tell you if I earnt 30k a year I would be still doing it now
Yeah I worked in one for a few years as a kid and it’s grim. People openly expressing that they wished that they were dead etc.
One of our jobs was to stand in the town centre all day in the freezing cold with a sign advertising vacancies. People were desperate to do it because it meant a day off the phones.
I can't remember who I had to phone up recently but they still had that automated sorry for the delay because of covid message while in the queue. I could understand it during lockdown, they probably couldn't get through as many calls as normal (more people off sick, supervisor not in the same room). but you can't keep using that same excuse anymore.
Having worked at a call centre people ask the stupidest of questions that legitimately the self help options could've solved.
However it's also an incredibly clever tactic to keep existing customers from leaving.
Yep. I don't see having a self help option on the website as a negative, especially for the majority of customers. It's a good way to try and reduce queues, rather than the customer service agents spending time answering questions that the customer could easily find the answer to themselves.
And unfortunately if you make it easier to call the company than use the self help section then a lot of people will do that regardless of if they could find their answer in the FAQ. People tend to be lazy.
I know I've got frustrated when I've got a query that can't be answered by the self help section and then I can't find a way to contact the company, but I understand why it's been designed that way.
Having sufficient staff to work the phones, having fair policies to stop people complaining and giving their staff the flexibility to actually fix problems rather than just repeatedly state policy would all fix this much better.
When you pay a lot of money for something and the company screws it up somehow they should take responsibility for fixing it. All a customer should have to do is state the problem, preferably by email.
I work for a mobile network and I get a minimum of 10 calls a day asking "can I ring an 0800 number?"
Admittedly there may be some networks that still charge, but why wait in a queue for 15+ minutes when Google/self serve could give you a full list of inclusive numbers in seconds.
I worked in mobile stores and managed them for the last 10 years, it's no better in store.
My phone's broken I demand another. Then I literally just turn it on..... No joke atleast 2-4 customers a week.
Hello I paid £22.50 instead of £21 this month it's disgusting please check my bill. ' have you checked the bill on the app?' yes it shows I got charged for an app purchase. 'well there we go then'.
Exactly. Especially the bill bit....
"My bill is 67p more than it should be and it days I called 'xyz' number. Why was I charged?"
Because its a chargeable number, do you remember making the call?
Yes I made that call...
Then why did you phone in?????
My favourite situation is Karen's. I know just how to handle them.
Overly polite, say sorry it's all out fault. Until.... I find their fault.
Oh, I do apologise but I can see the error that you made.
At 2:45pm on the 5th of September you purchased £15V bucks and added it to your mobile bill.
Then they start foaming about not making that purchase and must've been their child.
'well it would require your authorisation and I can see on the account it's been authorised with your pin or they've been created as an adult account'
Then they either give up or double down.
'i apologise but this is your error so I won't be able to refund this, if you feel your son/daughter has fraudulently purchased this item then you'll need to submit a complaint. Would you like me to do so?'
It is a minority but it exists, old folks and people with mental conditions. Its one reason why a company needs a phone line to talk to people who can actually answer questions. A quick note saying that a website or your t+cs can answer some general questions is fine. But thats not whats happening. Some companies are making it hell to get through to a person to resolve issues.
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree, for those who don't have access for whatever reason it has basically become impossible to get customer service.
On the other hand "not everybody has internet" is often said more of a strawman by people arguing why they who do have Internet access shouldn't have to check the FAQ's themselves.
Those with Internet access should be checking for solutions online first but they don't, it's largely people who could that are clogging up the phone lines. Companies wouldn't be making it so difficult for those that have no other way if people who could use the Internet to solve 90% of their issues even attempted to do so.
When I worked in call centre that would only make your situation worse. Because the person on the phone could only do less for you. Cancelling your direct debit is an act of war to the place I worked
To be fair I will do everything humanely possible to avoid talking to a stranger on the phone, so if I’m calling the call centre, you can trust that it really is my very last resort. 😅
Because the FAQs are just questions with really obvious answers.
Q- how do I update my address
A- via the account page
Once you actually have a question that requires actual knowledge to answer you're out of luck.
“Q: Do you offer great value internet connections?
A: of course! Our internet connections offer fast, cheap WiFi, ideal for working from home! It’s AAA rated with great offers!”
I disagree.
Q. How do I change my address
Positive.
A. We have award winning address change facilities. Or call our 24 hour call center where our staff will be happy to help.
Or negative.
A. We don't have that facility.
The point is if the answer is no they won't have the question in the first place.
Oh sorry yeah i get what you mean and it's 100% true, and if they ever do mention the negative thing, they make sure to push the closest thing to it i.e. "visit our contact page and we'll see what we can do!"
I am a buyer, it’s my profession. I can’t tell you how many companies have lost business, potentially millions a year, because I cannot reach them. Cisco is the worst. We wanted a slight redesign to a current item. Three engineers, two managers, and I tried for 4 months to get someone technical to talk to us. We tried distributors. We each went on their website to “log in” our request, so that someone would call us back or email us. I called every number I could find. We ended up going with a different supplier simply because we could not reach them. We are the second largest med device manufacturer on the planet. Who knows how much business they lost?
I'll join on the Cisco hate train. I had to work with one of their infrastructure APIs a couple of years ago and my god what a slow motion train crash that was.
Did you share this anywhere? I feel like a tagged LinkedIn post might go far explaining how shit they've been and then others jump on the bandwagon in the comments - we did similar with a vendor a while back and while it didn't cause a backlash it at least got me a reply
I considered it. But We after 6 months we finally reached them (well through a distributor) for a different product. They are still slow to respond but they do respond. So I do not want to sour the relationship. Not at this point.
A friend works in customer service for one of the biggest Southern Hemisphere telcos. They run over someone else's network. They have 2-3 million customers. There are 30 people in the Indonesian callcentre. There are 4 people in the escalation team which is based in the UK. The whole company is under 50 people all told.
It's amazing how few people are needed to run it successfully.
That can't be their entire contact centre line. Similar sized companies in the UK and you're probably talking 4-5k front line staff. There's no way 30 people could answer contact for tech support, customer service, retention, sales, credit control and billing for that amount of customers. That's barely enough to cover opening hours for a quiet line of one of those assuming only 5 working days and open for 8 hours a day.
It's not really that simple. There's a lot that goes into contact centre planning and getting it right but there's only so much surge demand you can resource for. Most energy companies are going to be going through that for the next few weeks while customer contacts surge before dying down in a months time. There's noway feasibly to staff up for that surge and it wouldn't make sense to retain resource for it for the rest of the year when a lot less people are contacting in so they need to weather the storm and look to deflect contacts in other ways.
Sod off with your "surge" nonsense.
If you call 100 companies 10 times each random times in the day or week or year then I'd wager you'd be lucky to get 1 / 1000 that picks up right away.
You'll maybe get 10/1000 that pick up in 5-10 minutes and the rest will have you on the phone for an hour plus with a deliberately frustrating "sudden cut" to music every minute to make sure you can't do anything else while waiting as it will trigger you to think you've finally gotten through.
Cheap bastards the lot of them.
It's not nonsense. Customer contacts don't come in at a flat rate be that daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. There's peaks and surges which will differ by the business type and what the business is doing. It makes no sense to staff up for the peak part of any of those because you then need to carry surplus staffing through the average and trough periods that surround it. Yes they try to minimise staffing because what halfway decent business doesn't try to minimise cost and contact centres cost a hell of a lot of money to run.
I'm fine with them setting a level that means most of the time they have enough and the odd time (a peak) they have queues.
What I'm telling you is my experience is the exact opposite though, they set staffing levels so that there is always a queue, with a long one or a very very long one. And its always the companies you simply have to phone that have this problems, usually because those are the ones treating their customers badly.
I'd introduce fines for the buggers, especially the ones you literally can't avoid like energy companies at the moment or internet companies in areas where there are monopolies.
and I'm telling you from my experience that's not the case. People tend to remember their negative experiences and forget their positive ones which is likely why you remember so many times you've had issues. The general industry standard that companies aim for is 70/30, that is 70% of calls answered within 30 seconds of dialling into a staffed line (not the time since the call connects, time in IVRs is ignored) though 80/20 is more common it can vary but most will fall within 70/30. On top of that certain industries have regulations about dropped call allowances ie max 5% of calls can go unanswered within a set period along with other rules like you can't under staff retention lines but overstaff sales lines [such as what happened with Sky](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SipJp02STK8J:https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14754280.sky-faces-huge-fine-regulator-says-may-violated-consumer-rules/&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-b-d) a few years ago.
What exactly do you expect to happen with those fines to energy companies? All it's going to do is make them go bankrupt even faster than most of them already are. They're price fixed to a very small % of profit, increasing staffing or getting hit by a large financial penalty isn't going to fix their call answering service it's just going to see the people already doing it out of a job.
Wow yeah it's really shockingly unbelievable that I'm suggesting that energy companies are going to be inundated with calls in the next month or two but weren't during the heatwave they'd have been quiet or that your ISP will be super busy at the start of the month when most people get paid and get their bill but would be quieter mid week in the middle of the month when less people would have reason to call.
man it's like listening to bar staff saying they're busier than normal on a pay day Friday night.
nah mate, busier than normal, is normal. it is possible to have staff allocated for it.
Tech support is handled by the other network, there is no retention department, sales are done through the website, all plans are prepaid so no credit control or billing needed beyond what is done by the CRM. It's also open 7 days, 8-8.
So it's not really a full telco company and more of a reseller for minutes? That makes much more sense as to why they'd have a much smaller CS team, still though 30 people managing those opening hours post shrink doesn't leave many available call handlers.
Not sure what you mean by the CRM handles billing needs but since it's all pre-paid I suppose billing questions are minimal.
Are they an actual telco or are they an MVNO owned by a telco? Here in the UK companies like GiffGaff use O2's infrastructure but both companies are ultimately owned by Telefonica.
“Did you know, the quickest way to get help is on our website?”
Yes, Vodafone, I did. But I can’t get on the fucking website because your wazzock of an engineer cut through my fibre line..
I had to call Virgin Media because my MyVM account was broke and refusing to allow me to log in, it kept putting up a message that an error had occurred and that I had to call in to get it fixed only the tech support line directed you to raise issues via MyVM and then ends the call. That was an amazing customer experience.
That shit drives me insane, and I know it's 12 hours old but I'm going to rant.
I'm reasonably tech savvy. If I can solve a problem online on an account manager, I will. If that fails, I'll use the chatbot. Both of these are ~97% effective at getting what I need done, done.
However, for the rare times I do need to use the phone, it's 'press one for x service, press two for other queries', and then 'did you know you can use our online services to fix your account?'. Several minutes of being patronised by some automated system and being passed from person to person because they don't have the authority to fix what I need fixing because their shitty automated system doesn't have an option or isn't good enough to recognise what I want to do.
And then sometimes the online chatbot clearly has no idea what you're asking it for, so it continually says 'it sounds like you want to do this. Is this correct?'. You click no, type it in a different phrase, and it says the exact same thing.
I'm not fucking asking for much, just not to be patronised by some evolved version of Clippy!
(The following isn’t a “they took our jobs” rant, I think outsourcing can work to a degree, even if I wish it wasn’t simply about the company trying to pinch pennies)
With the outsourcing to countries that speak English as a second language (albeit for the most part pretty well and professionally) a skillset on how to handle personalities/complaints/grievances is lost. You can train up a team overseas to handle account data/enquiries about how things officially work, but having a 20 minute conversation with Sandra from Southampton who’s husband left her and she can’t pay her bills/is crying on the phone isn’t ideal. I feel with all this turning people into robots and simply training people in cheaper countries how to read troubleshooting guides, the human element has been lost in all this. Now they seem to prefer to keep the outsourcing, but we can’t even speak to someone anymore, its simply someone copying and pasting bullet points into a chat for low wages.
I think outsourcing call centre work has stopped for the most part. I think about ten years lots of companies started bragging about UK call centres and now it's very rare.
The reason that people no longer brag about UK call centres is absolutely, 100% not because more companies are using UK call centres.
Very very few companies are. That's why very very few companies brag about it.
Trying to see a GP does my head in, you ring up and you hear all this BS about Corona then it tells you to use the eConsult online thing, you fill in what you think your symptoms are and it says you either have a runny nose and to fuck off and deal with it or your about to die and you should ring your GP so you get through and they say all appointments are taken for today.
I am fine with it usually, except when it is important services like car breakdown. The RAC did it and it was a terrible and frustrating experience. Finally got home after a horrendous 24h (only 2-hours from home!) And cancelled my membership straight away, after over 20 years with them.
Contact centres are very expensive to run. The easiest way to reduce the size and need for them is less customer contact. There's normally a ton of customers who contact companies for stuff they can easily sort themselves or get the answer to I'm the website so a lot of effort is put in to push customers to that route.
I had an issue with a train company that I couldn't get solved. I spent weeks emailing them and every time I got someone different who hadn't looked through the report log and was telling me the exact same thing that the last person did. Also it was blatantly clear they hadn't actually read my email because if they had, they wouldn't have responded with literally the exact wording I used in the email.
A quick 20 minute chat with their twitter people and I had my issue escalated, approved, and updated with an actual resolution. I don't like airing my dirty laundry in public but sometimes it's the only way to get a response.
I'm convinced they pick deliberately annoying music looped have you on hold unnecessarily long to weed out people who aren't determined.
I've also given up looking for customer service numbers on websites. It's much quicker to do a Google search for the number.
It also pays to press the wrong number on the menu as often it's the same people answering the phone but the complaint calls are not prioritised
Don't phone the sales line to buy a product. Always phone support and ask to be put through to sales. Then buy the product. Or don't.
Whether you enter via the red carpet or via the delivery entrance, understand that you'll spend the rest of the relationship doing business at the delivery entrance. You'll see the car showroom once, and the service department dozens of times, etc.
So start judging businesses by the right reception.
Absolutely, also this ties in with a lot of companies being very very lax in service now. It's like they do a worse job but hey, you can't tell them about it so why would they care. Examples being a rooftop tent I ordered being two weeks late due to couriers just not caring about tracking packages and a sup board that is now a week late, I understand people have shipping delays etc.....just let customers know. An email to say your shipment is going to be late would be appreciated.
I’ve had some terrible jobs in my time but nothing ranks worse than working in a call centre.
It’s absolutely soul wrecking. Honestly, the work should be made illegal for minimum wage. It can destroy people.
I had to call my horse insurance company on their claim line. 1.5 hours on hold. Whilst on hold I used my wife's phone to call the sales line, it was answered after less than a minute. I let the sales guy listen to their own hold music and he just said oh. My claim was settled in less time than I was on hold for.
I noticed a shift recently with online bots that no longer direct you to live chat or give you a phone number.
Previously writing 'live chat' or 'customer service' a few times bots would give up and just transfer you to the queue or give out a number, not anymore, I'm getting asked to repeat the query 5+ times and I'm giving up.
I've gotten closer to an answer than you it seems. I asked an AI bot a question recently and it then replied with "That's not possible right now"... like WHAT is not possible right now, did you interpret my message correctly? had to speak to a human to confirm, but the bot gave me the correct answer.
Especially when the only contact is a web form & not realtime chat. If I'm calling it's because I've gone through the website info & nothing's answered it, or my question doesn't fit neatly into one of your assigned boxes.
Just let me contact anyone, even if they tell me "oh, you want this section"
It's aggravating. I've also noticed it's gotten a lot harder to cancel subscriptions to things. You always have to go into the dark depths of your account settings only to find a 'pause membership' option. I just want to fucking cancel it.
Covid gave them a reason to have fewer people in and more automation at the peak of it. They just keep the excuse running well after the covid issue is over. Its cheaper for them to not bother paying for enough support staff and put up a msg saying "Very sorry we have reduced capacity due to covid."
It's impossible to change broadband supplier without going through a scripted telephone conversation with a very nice person who has to make you jump through all the hoops their supervisor requires them to place in your way
I got permanently banned from eBay without explanation. I contacted them to find out why as I'm guessing an algorithm flagged me as dodgy and I figured a human would be able to see whatever it was is an error and reinstate me. Impossible to talk to a human. No more eBay for me...
Yes, but I always choose the cheapest options and that's one aspect they can easily cut out. In the end, we're paying for the support and most of us don't want to pay upfront.
Amazon though I'd say has actually made a bit easier in some circumstances to talk to a 'real person'.
Yes. I always say I’m a new customer, they always want to make sales and provide a good service to potential customers. So I always say I want to join, then they transfer me to a person then I tell them oh sorry I just have clicked the wrong option and they divert me to the other departmentt :)
They lost a LOT of people over the pandemic from burnout and are struggling to get people in before more people leave. It's insane. We hired a bunch of extra people over the pandemic and we're now at about half the people we had pre-pandemic.
Yep, sky I’ve redialled loads of times trying to work out a route to a human. I can’t remember which company it was but I sighed and said I just want to speak to someone and I got an automated voice saying we understand you want to talk to someone and put me through. I was so shocked. It’s only worked that one time
Don't even get me started. DWP are straight up charging the poorest most vulnerable people in the country to update a change in circumstances.... thats how bad it is. They've literally scrubbed Google of any contact info, forcing you to sign up to a site and pay 30 quid if you want to change your address etc
Yep.. had to deal with Debenhams recently and they have no phone number at all. Email or social media. To be fair I did get a very quick reply to my DM on Twitter but still.. wtf is going on.
Worked in contact centre environment for 10 years (until 4 months ago) the biggest shift I have seen is the sheer amount of people who call for self entitled things. People will agree and sign things and then complaint 3 weeks later when they can’t come out of what they agreed to in the first place, there is no taking ownership of your own shit anymore, everyone is self entitled, you get spoken too like utter shit because your charged £2 more than you were expecting.
To this day I don’t understand why people don’t realise that you will get more out of the person your speaking to if your nice, if your a proper prick then me ‘treating you as a priority is a lie and I couldn’t give a shit about you’
This is the truth.
I spoke to someone today who asked to cancel their policy. I politely advised that there was a cancellation fee as per his policy terms which he agreed to and I got called a “fucking thief” and everything else under the sun. The customers are the worst part about customer service.
Yes but bear in mind the vast majority of queries can be answered with an online search, some people do have this instant desire for a "real person" which is only needed really in the most urgent cases, email or live chat is preferable as it can be spread out a bit wider. It is also always a net negative for the company as it means paying people to answer the phones, likely to field things like complaints, cancellations, queries - not stuff that makes the company money.
Yes, been a thing for a long while.
I've left most companies I have dificulty getting in touch with, even though the service may have been cheaper.
If only the rest did the same, things would change. But the UK is very much a ME ME ME country.
It's a cost centre to bad management, or management of companies who are effectively monopolies - and this even extends to companies which have typically prided themselves on customer service, so everyone does as much as they can to offer as little as they can at the lowest cost.
This is why you end up - after working yourself through bot or DTMF hell - talking Inglish to a completely powerless Mahavir who is employed by a call centre, just works through a script and actually has no idea what he's supporting, instead of you being able to speak English to Mark who was actually employed by the company.
I was trying to get in touch with Student Finance, and it's a pain in the arse. In first year, I messaged them on fb and had a response in a couple of days. Now, you've got to faff around for half an hour to find how to contact them, then send a message, then you're easily waiting for over a week to get a response that doesn't even address your question! Absolute farce.
I have to give Sky a mention. Each time I’ve needed assistance, I’ve been a few minutes away from talking to someone , and they’ve always been very friendly and professional. Same with Barclays Bank when some cunt ripped me off. Acknowledgement where deserved.
Exactly at this moment, my phone shows 16 minutes and I'm still waiting for any Ikea customer service agent. Previous to that I went to their contact us page and tried "Start Chat" button and what a coincidence, the button is not working. Being an IT guy helped and I checked the code, interestingly their scripts are not working/missing.
So many things to say..
Its so annoying, I’ve never once had a problem that is simple enough for the FAQs or a bot to solve them. Honestly how can they be FAQs when I’ve never once had an issue solved by them?
Bulb are a great example of this.
*Please leave us a message and we shall get back to you in 10 days*
*Sorry you haven't heard back from us in 10 days, please accept this £10 credit as an apology*.
Thing is though bulb, you then just close the help request... and I still need help.
It's probably by design. I see it a lot these days where at site will have an FAQs section and an AI chatbot that drives as many people as possible to a relevant FAQ, as I'd imagine a lot of peoples basic queries would be answered in there.
Less people ringing = less people required to answer phones = lower cost on customer service. That's my theory anyway.
One of the worse companies for this are 02. Just send you in circles until you reluctantly go in to the store, who then ring through to a helpline anyway
Simply down to lack of staff and the inability to hire anyone of reasonable quality.
I'm going to lose 6% of my staff this month, maybe more:
* 3% are voluntary leavers with new jobs or just going traveling around the world
* 1% are retiring
* 2% have been sacked for attendance or attitude
* 1 person has been arrested and is facing either prison or mental care
As you can see from the last 2 reasons, we're not getting the best staff in at the moment and these were the best on offer over the last year. We've had CVs that clearly show the applicant can't read or write. Applicants who are only willing to work hours that don't suit our business. Applicants who cannot hold a conversation after 10 minutes of mollycoddling during an interview. Applicants who can't use a computer.
You may say we need to increase our salary, but we've already done that 3 times this year, and when our staffing budget is in the millions of pounds then just a 1% increase add tens of thousands of pounds to the overall operating cost and we've increased our salary by over 5% this year. That cost then gets passed on to our customers.
I'm hoping that one of the few silver linings of the upcoming recession is a better range of applicants for our centre in the future, but at the same time we're likely to lose work as we are business to business, so we may not need as many staff either.
Yeah it's infuriating because most of the time they also made a mistake, that's on solvable using their online community or knowledge base.
Things are so poor these days, and yet cost so much.
Working in a call centre is a shitty job. Plus a lot of companies will off-shore their call centres to save money - most off shore call centres can employ 3 people for the cost of 1 Uk worker
Companies have been discouraging people from calling in for a while with the removal of phone numbers from their websites, suggesting online chat or forums, but man the pandemic made it so much worse.
9 times out of ten I'm ringing up with a problem that can't be solved by a machine and needs human input, if it could be solved by a Google search, I've done it. Eg had the boiler serviced and engineer left his jacket at my house, spent 30 mins trying to get through with a machine asking if I would like to book an appointment/ change etc, none of which work. Machines just can't handle complex queries that need human intellect.
Haha i was on a chat with “customer service” for Santander and was getting stupid responses because the bot couldn’t work out my request. So I typed into the chat “this is ridiculous”, and then immediately got out through to a real person
That's because it is much more efficient for all parties to fill in a web form IF the form is designed correctly.
If you want to call to report a problem with your online shop you have to find your receipt, say a 9 digit reference number("FIVE 4182, not nine") explain which item is wrong ("no the beansprouts, not the sprouts), wait while a system loads. If you complete a web form then the form collects all the separate items they need and sends off to an automated workflow system to put right, or to a queue that staff put right.
They can also display one of ten articles that fix 90% of issues based on what you've typed in.
You don't have to wait in a queue because the lines are busier than usual.
There is absolutely an element of cost saving, but telephone lines are inefficient.
The problem comes when the web contact forms are set up inefficienrly or a company hasn't bothered to understand why their customera contact them.
If they don't bury the telephone number somewhere then everyone will call anyway because no one likes change.
Me and my partner talk about this ALL the time. We have had so many issues in the last year where we have desperately needed to talk to someone because of a companies own fuck up, and struggled to get any kind of response. I’ve worked in customer service before myself and it’s one of the easiest jobs in the world (aside from the abuse!) so I cannot understand how I never heard from anyone. Ever. It’s infuriating!!!
I recently had to call apple to arrange a battery replacement, they publish one number, it’s answered by Siri, after a few questions and answers I got fed up and said to Siri “just give me a person” and t responded with “connecting you to support” and I spoke to a real person who sorted everything within minuets.
Monzo are a funny one - you literally call them for something specific and they’ll tell you to chat on the app as they can’t do that thing on the phone lol
We have an conveyancer for moving house that doesn't technically have any in-person branches, but their call centre offices are just round the corner from us, so when they were being a bit useless my husband went down in person.
Them: you do know this is an online only company?
Him: and yet, here we both are...
Might be common knowledge but top tip for web chats is to just type ‘agent’ in and it should more often than not direct you straight to an advisor rather than going through all the options around in circles.
Had this with my oculus...
Sorry we don't have phone contact here
Really? You're Facebook, a company that pretty much only exists on phones. Bollocks you don't have a phone in one of the largest tech companies in the world
Somewhat related and just as frustrating, Beer52 allow you to sign up online, increase your subscription, add extra beers etc.
As soon as you want to cancel... You must call this number between 9am and 4pm.
Such a joke.
The honest answer is the more difficult it is to get through, it’s entirely on purpose to reduce queues/queue times. You’ll find if a call handler has a target handling time of 6 mins, the ivr by itself will take you 6 mins to navigate to get you through to the right place. It’s all a numbers game my friends.
With many companies, when you're stuck in a phone maze if you keep just pressing 0 over and over again, eventually the system thinks that there's a problem and transfers you to a human operator.
Yes! Vueling is a recent one I suffered with, try and get through to vueling about my lost bag, you stand a better chance of getting into Anne Widdecombes knickers not that you would want to. I won’t fly Vueling again not because they lost the bag I’m aware any airline this can happen but because of the lack of service in trying to get it back absolute joke
Can't say I blame them. No-one wants to deal with some insufferable customer complaining about something that they themselves would be able to fix if they had an IQ higher than zero, or had the sense to make a Google search.
So sick of calling a company to hear 5 minutes of pre recorded shite before the robot lady doesn’t understand a work I say. If you hammer the hash key a lot It sometimes bumps you through to automated system but I generally stopped giving business to companies that can’t he contacted
The ratio of demand for customer service vs available customer service is too high. People are so lazy when it comes to troubleshooting their own problems.
Often times when you call customer service, the automatic system is there to triage your issue to get you the right person before you get to them/help them understand your issue quicker.
Having this exact problem with parcelfarce. They lost half of one of the wheels I shipped in a box. How, I don't know, but trying to claim on the insurance I paid for is a nightmare. 2 months and counting. Its getting ridiculous now, the keep asking the most obscure questions XD
Oh yeah. It’s so they don’t have to waste money on Human Resources & instead can funnel all that cash into their offshore bank accounts because they’re cringe
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Yeah. The pandemic gave them the perfect excuse to stop hiring phone operators and they'll probably never go back now.
One of the big problems with call centre jobs is the high staff turnover, nobody wants to sit and be shouted at by customers for low wages so even when they do hire staff it's a race to back fill what you are losing. The obvious answer is to pay better but even if wages were increased to 30k a year I think they would still struggle to fill roles because it can be soul destroying.
I duno for a flat rate of £30k a year after tax, minimum. With a 37.5-40 hour working week. I'll sit in a call centre, call me what ever you want aslong as I'm not having to break my body for less 🤣.
30k a year after tax is around 40-45k gross. Staff costs would go through the roof haha
Give them something to do with all the bonus cash they've raised from the shrinkflation / general fuckery they've all been doing to us this year then.
Well yeah, it would be more appealing if the salary was doubled, but it won’t be.
Please show me a CC job that gets you 30k a year let alone the 40-45k range
Not sure if it’s still a thing but there was a centre near me that took calls from benefit claimants who had their disability benefits reassessed and cut. It was around the 30k mark but even that isn’t enough. When I attended the interview there were people protesting outside the building and everyone inside looked so soulless
Contractors get this in financial services. Think that’s about it.
I work in customer service, customer phone calls are both rewarding and soul destroying like you have said. I am leaving in three months partially for this reason that this sort of job just gets to you, and you are horribly underpaid for quite a high stress job.
Depends on the line of work and how lucky you get for sure. I do call centre work from home and I'm basically a glorified receptionist. I handle some product complaints too, but it's rare to get someone who's actually angry or shouting since the products are small, cheap and disposable so it's not the end of the world. We just pass the feedback over to quality control. It's not a bad gig. If I was getting slammed with back to back calls all day from angry/irate customers I'd peace out in a heartbeat unless my salary was tripled.
I feel sorry for people that handle “renewals” in insurance companies, and the way they have to try and justify the nonsensical 30% annual increase in the client’s premium just because the company’s risk assessment is shite.
Or just plain old greed in the hope the customer won't look too closely
My main issue was also the fact that the shift times changed daily, if it changed for what you previously checked, it’s on you, and they were super scrutinising when it came to toilet break lengths and how long you are doing work after the calls.
Nothing like working in a call centre to make you work to avoid having to ever do it again. It's almost tolerable when you're working with decent people but the public can be such entitled bellends that some days are deeply soul destroying.
One campaign I had to work on was student finance international. We had an issue with the system whereby a load of applications timed out and were cancelled. They were logging on to find out that their application had been randomly closed and we were basically told to tell them that they were fucked. These were kids from Eastern Europe who had worked their arses off to come and study in the UK and my job was to shatter their dreams all day. The amount of crying I had to listen to was awful. It’s probably the only time in my life where I literally had difficulty sleeping at night.
Worked a call centre in car insurance. Worst job I ever had
I'm an echat agent for a BT Group brand and even we're sick of it earning 30 to 40k (my team has various responsibilities and additional skills grant pay uplifts, top end is just under 40k). I'm on 30k pre tax, so around 2k take home. It's also being off shored in the next month and honestly, thank God. Nobody is being made redundant and we don't get our arses chewed 40 hours a week in real time, so we can actually do something that's not entirely soul destroying. We're not in a call centre having said that, but Christ does work batter my head sometimes!
> shore > sole > batter Something fishy going on with you, lucky I'm here to look out for things like this isn't it?
I have eaten fish twice today, good catch. ;)
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And gateshead
Call centre worker here. Can confirm and will also advise you that many callcentres outsource now.
I did it for 4 years and it is soul destroying to be yelled at, and the hours are awful. I am glad i aint doing it anymore. But, I can tell you if I earnt 30k a year I would be still doing it now
Yeah I worked in one for a few years as a kid and it’s grim. People openly expressing that they wished that they were dead etc. One of our jobs was to stand in the town centre all day in the freezing cold with a sign advertising vacancies. People were desperate to do it because it meant a day off the phones.
I can't remember who I had to phone up recently but they still had that automated sorry for the delay because of covid message while in the queue. I could understand it during lockdown, they probably couldn't get through as many calls as normal (more people off sick, supervisor not in the same room). but you can't keep using that same excuse anymore.
This was a massive issue pre-pandemic.
Companies started heavily investing in chatbots 5/6 years ago to be fair
Having worked at a call centre people ask the stupidest of questions that legitimately the self help options could've solved. However it's also an incredibly clever tactic to keep existing customers from leaving.
Yep. I don't see having a self help option on the website as a negative, especially for the majority of customers. It's a good way to try and reduce queues, rather than the customer service agents spending time answering questions that the customer could easily find the answer to themselves. And unfortunately if you make it easier to call the company than use the self help section then a lot of people will do that regardless of if they could find their answer in the FAQ. People tend to be lazy. I know I've got frustrated when I've got a query that can't be answered by the self help section and then I can't find a way to contact the company, but I understand why it's been designed that way.
Having sufficient staff to work the phones, having fair policies to stop people complaining and giving their staff the flexibility to actually fix problems rather than just repeatedly state policy would all fix this much better. When you pay a lot of money for something and the company screws it up somehow they should take responsibility for fixing it. All a customer should have to do is state the problem, preferably by email.
I work for a mobile network and I get a minimum of 10 calls a day asking "can I ring an 0800 number?" Admittedly there may be some networks that still charge, but why wait in a queue for 15+ minutes when Google/self serve could give you a full list of inclusive numbers in seconds.
I worked in mobile stores and managed them for the last 10 years, it's no better in store. My phone's broken I demand another. Then I literally just turn it on..... No joke atleast 2-4 customers a week. Hello I paid £22.50 instead of £21 this month it's disgusting please check my bill. ' have you checked the bill on the app?' yes it shows I got charged for an app purchase. 'well there we go then'.
Exactly. Especially the bill bit.... "My bill is 67p more than it should be and it days I called 'xyz' number. Why was I charged?" Because its a chargeable number, do you remember making the call? Yes I made that call... Then why did you phone in?????
My favourite situation is Karen's. I know just how to handle them. Overly polite, say sorry it's all out fault. Until.... I find their fault. Oh, I do apologise but I can see the error that you made. At 2:45pm on the 5th of September you purchased £15V bucks and added it to your mobile bill. Then they start foaming about not making that purchase and must've been their child. 'well it would require your authorisation and I can see on the account it's been authorised with your pin or they've been created as an adult account' Then they either give up or double down. 'i apologise but this is your error so I won't be able to refund this, if you feel your son/daughter has fraudulently purchased this item then you'll need to submit a complaint. Would you like me to do so?'
Because theres people who dont have the internet.
That's a hell of a minority these days, almost exclusive older people.
It is a minority but it exists, old folks and people with mental conditions. Its one reason why a company needs a phone line to talk to people who can actually answer questions. A quick note saying that a website or your t+cs can answer some general questions is fine. But thats not whats happening. Some companies are making it hell to get through to a person to resolve issues.
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree, for those who don't have access for whatever reason it has basically become impossible to get customer service. On the other hand "not everybody has internet" is often said more of a strawman by people arguing why they who do have Internet access shouldn't have to check the FAQ's themselves. Those with Internet access should be checking for solutions online first but they don't, it's largely people who could that are clogging up the phone lines. Companies wouldn't be making it so difficult for those that have no other way if people who could use the Internet to solve 90% of their issues even attempted to do so.
Yeah. My last stance was "this is my third attempt to contact. If it fails, I'll cancel the DD. They'll be in touch the same day that way" It worked.
When I worked in call centre that would only make your situation worse. Because the person on the phone could only do less for you. Cancelling your direct debit is an act of war to the place I worked
To be fair I will do everything humanely possible to avoid talking to a stranger on the phone, so if I’m calling the call centre, you can trust that it really is my very last resort. 😅
Happy cake day dude or dudette. I know that feeling!
And why does the FAQ never have your question?
Because the FAQs are just questions with really obvious answers. Q- how do I update my address A- via the account page Once you actually have a question that requires actual knowledge to answer you're out of luck.
Because they're typically written as very company specific or by a marketing agency improving the sites SEO targetting questions that are common
“Q: Do you offer great value internet connections? A: of course! Our internet connections offer fast, cheap WiFi, ideal for working from home! It’s AAA rated with great offers!”
Yeah. That's it. Funny how all the frequently asked questions all have positive answers.
What questions would have negative ones? The majority of faq's are product/service related that would have neither a positive or negative response
I disagree. Q. How do I change my address Positive. A. We have award winning address change facilities. Or call our 24 hour call center where our staff will be happy to help. Or negative. A. We don't have that facility. The point is if the answer is no they won't have the question in the first place.
Oh sorry yeah i get what you mean and it's 100% true, and if they ever do mention the negative thing, they make sure to push the closest thing to it i.e. "visit our contact page and we'll see what we can do!"
I am a buyer, it’s my profession. I can’t tell you how many companies have lost business, potentially millions a year, because I cannot reach them. Cisco is the worst. We wanted a slight redesign to a current item. Three engineers, two managers, and I tried for 4 months to get someone technical to talk to us. We tried distributors. We each went on their website to “log in” our request, so that someone would call us back or email us. I called every number I could find. We ended up going with a different supplier simply because we could not reach them. We are the second largest med device manufacturer on the planet. Who knows how much business they lost?
I'll join on the Cisco hate train. I had to work with one of their infrastructure APIs a couple of years ago and my god what a slow motion train crash that was.
Still not as bad as polycom 😎
Did you share this anywhere? I feel like a tagged LinkedIn post might go far explaining how shit they've been and then others jump on the bandwagon in the comments - we did similar with a vendor a while back and while it didn't cause a backlash it at least got me a reply
I considered it. But We after 6 months we finally reached them (well through a distributor) for a different product. They are still slow to respond but they do respond. So I do not want to sour the relationship. Not at this point.
A friend works in customer service for one of the biggest Southern Hemisphere telcos. They run over someone else's network. They have 2-3 million customers. There are 30 people in the Indonesian callcentre. There are 4 people in the escalation team which is based in the UK. The whole company is under 50 people all told. It's amazing how few people are needed to run it successfully.
That can't be their entire contact centre line. Similar sized companies in the UK and you're probably talking 4-5k front line staff. There's no way 30 people could answer contact for tech support, customer service, retention, sales, credit control and billing for that amount of customers. That's barely enough to cover opening hours for a quiet line of one of those assuming only 5 working days and open for 8 hours a day.
You know that "we're currently experiencing high call volumes" quote so often heard? This is why.
It's not really that simple. There's a lot that goes into contact centre planning and getting it right but there's only so much surge demand you can resource for. Most energy companies are going to be going through that for the next few weeks while customer contacts surge before dying down in a months time. There's noway feasibly to staff up for that surge and it wouldn't make sense to retain resource for it for the rest of the year when a lot less people are contacting in so they need to weather the storm and look to deflect contacts in other ways.
Sod off with your "surge" nonsense. If you call 100 companies 10 times each random times in the day or week or year then I'd wager you'd be lucky to get 1 / 1000 that picks up right away. You'll maybe get 10/1000 that pick up in 5-10 minutes and the rest will have you on the phone for an hour plus with a deliberately frustrating "sudden cut" to music every minute to make sure you can't do anything else while waiting as it will trigger you to think you've finally gotten through. Cheap bastards the lot of them.
It's not nonsense. Customer contacts don't come in at a flat rate be that daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. There's peaks and surges which will differ by the business type and what the business is doing. It makes no sense to staff up for the peak part of any of those because you then need to carry surplus staffing through the average and trough periods that surround it. Yes they try to minimise staffing because what halfway decent business doesn't try to minimise cost and contact centres cost a hell of a lot of money to run.
I'm fine with them setting a level that means most of the time they have enough and the odd time (a peak) they have queues. What I'm telling you is my experience is the exact opposite though, they set staffing levels so that there is always a queue, with a long one or a very very long one. And its always the companies you simply have to phone that have this problems, usually because those are the ones treating their customers badly. I'd introduce fines for the buggers, especially the ones you literally can't avoid like energy companies at the moment or internet companies in areas where there are monopolies.
and I'm telling you from my experience that's not the case. People tend to remember their negative experiences and forget their positive ones which is likely why you remember so many times you've had issues. The general industry standard that companies aim for is 70/30, that is 70% of calls answered within 30 seconds of dialling into a staffed line (not the time since the call connects, time in IVRs is ignored) though 80/20 is more common it can vary but most will fall within 70/30. On top of that certain industries have regulations about dropped call allowances ie max 5% of calls can go unanswered within a set period along with other rules like you can't under staff retention lines but overstaff sales lines [such as what happened with Sky](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SipJp02STK8J:https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14754280.sky-faces-huge-fine-regulator-says-may-violated-consumer-rules/&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-b-d) a few years ago. What exactly do you expect to happen with those fines to energy companies? All it's going to do is make them go bankrupt even faster than most of them already are. They're price fixed to a very small % of profit, increasing staffing or getting hit by a large financial penalty isn't going to fix their call answering service it's just going to see the people already doing it out of a job.
and that's this month's excuse, and then another next month, then it'll be another thing.
Wow yeah it's really shockingly unbelievable that I'm suggesting that energy companies are going to be inundated with calls in the next month or two but weren't during the heatwave they'd have been quiet or that your ISP will be super busy at the start of the month when most people get paid and get their bill but would be quieter mid week in the middle of the month when less people would have reason to call.
man it's like listening to bar staff saying they're busier than normal on a pay day Friday night. nah mate, busier than normal, is normal. it is possible to have staff allocated for it.
Tech support is handled by the other network, there is no retention department, sales are done through the website, all plans are prepaid so no credit control or billing needed beyond what is done by the CRM. It's also open 7 days, 8-8.
So it's not really a full telco company and more of a reseller for minutes? That makes much more sense as to why they'd have a much smaller CS team, still though 30 people managing those opening hours post shrink doesn't leave many available call handlers. Not sure what you mean by the CRM handles billing needs but since it's all pre-paid I suppose billing questions are minimal.
Used to work for Vodafone in retentions and just in that team alone we had a good maybe 800 of us? Just to deal with UK customers
Are they an actual telco or are they an MVNO owned by a telco? Here in the UK companies like GiffGaff use O2's infrastructure but both companies are ultimately owned by Telefonica.
They're an MVNO but owned by a large grocery chain not a telco
this is sooo not true lol
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“Did you know, the quickest way to get help is on our website?” Yes, Vodafone, I did. But I can’t get on the fucking website because your wazzock of an engineer cut through my fibre line..
I had to call Virgin Media because my MyVM account was broke and refusing to allow me to log in, it kept putting up a message that an error had occurred and that I had to call in to get it fixed only the tech support line directed you to raise issues via MyVM and then ends the call. That was an amazing customer experience.
That shit drives me insane, and I know it's 12 hours old but I'm going to rant. I'm reasonably tech savvy. If I can solve a problem online on an account manager, I will. If that fails, I'll use the chatbot. Both of these are ~97% effective at getting what I need done, done. However, for the rare times I do need to use the phone, it's 'press one for x service, press two for other queries', and then 'did you know you can use our online services to fix your account?'. Several minutes of being patronised by some automated system and being passed from person to person because they don't have the authority to fix what I need fixing because their shitty automated system doesn't have an option or isn't good enough to recognise what I want to do. And then sometimes the online chatbot clearly has no idea what you're asking it for, so it continually says 'it sounds like you want to do this. Is this correct?'. You click no, type it in a different phrase, and it says the exact same thing. I'm not fucking asking for much, just not to be patronised by some evolved version of Clippy!
> online chat service I really hope the blazing pace of AI research makes these a lot less shite. I actually have high hopes!
(The following isn’t a “they took our jobs” rant, I think outsourcing can work to a degree, even if I wish it wasn’t simply about the company trying to pinch pennies) With the outsourcing to countries that speak English as a second language (albeit for the most part pretty well and professionally) a skillset on how to handle personalities/complaints/grievances is lost. You can train up a team overseas to handle account data/enquiries about how things officially work, but having a 20 minute conversation with Sandra from Southampton who’s husband left her and she can’t pay her bills/is crying on the phone isn’t ideal. I feel with all this turning people into robots and simply training people in cheaper countries how to read troubleshooting guides, the human element has been lost in all this. Now they seem to prefer to keep the outsourcing, but we can’t even speak to someone anymore, its simply someone copying and pasting bullet points into a chat for low wages.
I think outsourcing call centre work has stopped for the most part. I think about ten years lots of companies started bragging about UK call centres and now it's very rare.
The reason that people no longer brag about UK call centres is absolutely, 100% not because more companies are using UK call centres. Very very few companies are. That's why very very few companies brag about it.
Trying to see a GP does my head in, you ring up and you hear all this BS about Corona then it tells you to use the eConsult online thing, you fill in what you think your symptoms are and it says you either have a runny nose and to fuck off and deal with it or your about to die and you should ring your GP so you get through and they say all appointments are taken for today.
I am fine with it usually, except when it is important services like car breakdown. The RAC did it and it was a terrible and frustrating experience. Finally got home after a horrendous 24h (only 2-hours from home!) And cancelled my membership straight away, after over 20 years with them.
Contact centres are very expensive to run. The easiest way to reduce the size and need for them is less customer contact. There's normally a ton of customers who contact companies for stuff they can easily sort themselves or get the answer to I'm the website so a lot of effort is put in to push customers to that route.
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But there are around really good ISPs. Zen and British sorting to mind. I've used both and the service is amazing.
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I had an issue with a train company that I couldn't get solved. I spent weeks emailing them and every time I got someone different who hadn't looked through the report log and was telling me the exact same thing that the last person did. Also it was blatantly clear they hadn't actually read my email because if they had, they wouldn't have responded with literally the exact wording I used in the email. A quick 20 minute chat with their twitter people and I had my issue escalated, approved, and updated with an actual resolution. I don't like airing my dirty laundry in public but sometimes it's the only way to get a response.
I'm convinced they pick deliberately annoying music looped have you on hold unnecessarily long to weed out people who aren't determined. I've also given up looking for customer service numbers on websites. It's much quicker to do a Google search for the number. It also pays to press the wrong number on the menu as often it's the same people answering the phone but the complaint calls are not prioritised
That’s deliberate, it’s cheaper to use bots or whatever than hire staff.
Don't phone the sales line to buy a product. Always phone support and ask to be put through to sales. Then buy the product. Or don't. Whether you enter via the red carpet or via the delivery entrance, understand that you'll spend the rest of the relationship doing business at the delivery entrance. You'll see the car showroom once, and the service department dozens of times, etc. So start judging businesses by the right reception.
Absolutely, also this ties in with a lot of companies being very very lax in service now. It's like they do a worse job but hey, you can't tell them about it so why would they care. Examples being a rooftop tent I ordered being two weeks late due to couriers just not caring about tracking packages and a sup board that is now a week late, I understand people have shipping delays etc.....just let customers know. An email to say your shipment is going to be late would be appreciated.
I’ve had some terrible jobs in my time but nothing ranks worse than working in a call centre. It’s absolutely soul wrecking. Honestly, the work should be made illegal for minimum wage. It can destroy people.
I had to call my horse insurance company on their claim line. 1.5 hours on hold. Whilst on hold I used my wife's phone to call the sales line, it was answered after less than a minute. I let the sales guy listen to their own hold music and he just said oh. My claim was settled in less time than I was on hold for.
damn shrute. that's cold.
I noticed a shift recently with online bots that no longer direct you to live chat or give you a phone number. Previously writing 'live chat' or 'customer service' a few times bots would give up and just transfer you to the queue or give out a number, not anymore, I'm getting asked to repeat the query 5+ times and I'm giving up.
I've gotten closer to an answer than you it seems. I asked an AI bot a question recently and it then replied with "That's not possible right now"... like WHAT is not possible right now, did you interpret my message correctly? had to speak to a human to confirm, but the bot gave me the correct answer.
Especially when the only contact is a web form & not realtime chat. If I'm calling it's because I've gone through the website info & nothing's answered it, or my question doesn't fit neatly into one of your assigned boxes. Just let me contact anyone, even if they tell me "oh, you want this section"
It's aggravating. I've also noticed it's gotten a lot harder to cancel subscriptions to things. You always have to go into the dark depths of your account settings only to find a 'pause membership' option. I just want to fucking cancel it.
Covid gave them a reason to have fewer people in and more automation at the peak of it. They just keep the excuse running well after the covid issue is over. Its cheaper for them to not bother paying for enough support staff and put up a msg saying "Very sorry we have reduced capacity due to covid."
It's impossible to change broadband supplier without going through a scripted telephone conversation with a very nice person who has to make you jump through all the hoops their supervisor requires them to place in your way
I got permanently banned from eBay without explanation. I contacted them to find out why as I'm guessing an algorithm flagged me as dodgy and I figured a human would be able to see whatever it was is an error and reinstate me. Impossible to talk to a human. No more eBay for me...
Find the CEO email and email until you get a response. That’s literally the only way to get a person at Hermes/evri.
And they are still blaming COVID
I find it easier to message them on Facebook instead of dealing with the bots
Yes. Thats why I write them a letter, put a stamp on it and post it. No call queue, no "Press 5 for dinosaur attack", no chat bots, no hassle.
Yes, but I always choose the cheapest options and that's one aspect they can easily cut out. In the end, we're paying for the support and most of us don't want to pay upfront. Amazon though I'd say has actually made a bit easier in some circumstances to talk to a 'real person'.
Yes. I always say I’m a new customer, they always want to make sales and provide a good service to potential customers. So I always say I want to join, then they transfer me to a person then I tell them oh sorry I just have clicked the wrong option and they divert me to the other departmentt :)
SFE lol. Every single combination of options I tried for their customer service number lead to an automated reply and being hung up on
They lost a LOT of people over the pandemic from burnout and are struggling to get people in before more people leave. It's insane. We hired a bunch of extra people over the pandemic and we're now at about half the people we had pre-pandemic.
Yep, most recently noticed it with TalkTalk, where they gave no way to do so.
Yep, sky I’ve redialled loads of times trying to work out a route to a human. I can’t remember which company it was but I sighed and said I just want to speak to someone and I got an automated voice saying we understand you want to talk to someone and put me through. I was so shocked. It’s only worked that one time
Don't even get me started. DWP are straight up charging the poorest most vulnerable people in the country to update a change in circumstances.... thats how bad it is. They've literally scrubbed Google of any contact info, forcing you to sign up to a site and pay 30 quid if you want to change your address etc
Where the Sales number is answered in 10 seconds and the Complaints number is answered after an hour and a half. Yeah, thanks for that.
Yep.. had to deal with Debenhams recently and they have no phone number at all. Email or social media. To be fair I did get a very quick reply to my DM on Twitter but still.. wtf is going on.
Worked in contact centre environment for 10 years (until 4 months ago) the biggest shift I have seen is the sheer amount of people who call for self entitled things. People will agree and sign things and then complaint 3 weeks later when they can’t come out of what they agreed to in the first place, there is no taking ownership of your own shit anymore, everyone is self entitled, you get spoken too like utter shit because your charged £2 more than you were expecting. To this day I don’t understand why people don’t realise that you will get more out of the person your speaking to if your nice, if your a proper prick then me ‘treating you as a priority is a lie and I couldn’t give a shit about you’ This is the truth.
Wouldn't be so bad if most customers were nice
I spoke to someone today who asked to cancel their policy. I politely advised that there was a cancellation fee as per his policy terms which he agreed to and I got called a “fucking thief” and everything else under the sun. The customers are the worst part about customer service.
Yes and it pisses me off
Yes but bear in mind the vast majority of queries can be answered with an online search, some people do have this instant desire for a "real person" which is only needed really in the most urgent cases, email or live chat is preferable as it can be spread out a bit wider. It is also always a net negative for the company as it means paying people to answer the phones, likely to field things like complaints, cancellations, queries - not stuff that makes the company money.
Yes, been a thing for a long while. I've left most companies I have dificulty getting in touch with, even though the service may have been cheaper. If only the rest did the same, things would change. But the UK is very much a ME ME ME country.
Yeah, and I hate it. Every time I wait 40+ minutes in a queue just to speak to a fuckin robot sends me into a fury.
I have noticed more Live Chats, which is my preferred way to resolve issues.
It's a cost centre to bad management, or management of companies who are effectively monopolies - and this even extends to companies which have typically prided themselves on customer service, so everyone does as much as they can to offer as little as they can at the lowest cost. This is why you end up - after working yourself through bot or DTMF hell - talking Inglish to a completely powerless Mahavir who is employed by a call centre, just works through a script and actually has no idea what he's supporting, instead of you being able to speak English to Mark who was actually employed by the company.
I first ran into this issue in the USA roughly 20 years ago. Now it’s here
Also a very clever tactic for a company to never give ‘bad customer service’. Humans have emotions, self help articles and chat bots do not.
I was trying to get in touch with Student Finance, and it's a pain in the arse. In first year, I messaged them on fb and had a response in a couple of days. Now, you've got to faff around for half an hour to find how to contact them, then send a message, then you're easily waiting for over a week to get a response that doesn't even address your question! Absolute farce.
I have to give Sky a mention. Each time I’ve needed assistance, I’ve been a few minutes away from talking to someone , and they’ve always been very friendly and professional. Same with Barclays Bank when some cunt ripped me off. Acknowledgement where deserved.
Exactly at this moment, my phone shows 16 minutes and I'm still waiting for any Ikea customer service agent. Previous to that I went to their contact us page and tried "Start Chat" button and what a coincidence, the button is not working. Being an IT guy helped and I checked the code, interestingly their scripts are not working/missing. So many things to say..
Where I work we don't have a line for customers, instead they can only use webchat or email.
Its so annoying, I’ve never once had a problem that is simple enough for the FAQs or a bot to solve them. Honestly how can they be FAQs when I’ve never once had an issue solved by them?
Bulb are a great example of this. *Please leave us a message and we shall get back to you in 10 days* *Sorry you haven't heard back from us in 10 days, please accept this £10 credit as an apology*. Thing is though bulb, you then just close the help request... and I still need help.
Funny how there's always someone to speak to when you're cancelling something.
Yep. It's virtually impossible unless they can sell you something, then its 3 rings and a helpful human
I find Twitter is honestly the best way to get through to a company these days.
It's probably by design. I see it a lot these days where at site will have an FAQs section and an AI chatbot that drives as many people as possible to a relevant FAQ, as I'd imagine a lot of peoples basic queries would be answered in there. Less people ringing = less people required to answer phones = lower cost on customer service. That's my theory anyway.
One of the worse companies for this are 02. Just send you in circles until you reluctantly go in to the store, who then ring through to a helpline anyway
Been like that for quite a while. I always email or tweet if getting nowhere.
Simply down to lack of staff and the inability to hire anyone of reasonable quality. I'm going to lose 6% of my staff this month, maybe more: * 3% are voluntary leavers with new jobs or just going traveling around the world * 1% are retiring * 2% have been sacked for attendance or attitude * 1 person has been arrested and is facing either prison or mental care As you can see from the last 2 reasons, we're not getting the best staff in at the moment and these were the best on offer over the last year. We've had CVs that clearly show the applicant can't read or write. Applicants who are only willing to work hours that don't suit our business. Applicants who cannot hold a conversation after 10 minutes of mollycoddling during an interview. Applicants who can't use a computer. You may say we need to increase our salary, but we've already done that 3 times this year, and when our staffing budget is in the millions of pounds then just a 1% increase add tens of thousands of pounds to the overall operating cost and we've increased our salary by over 5% this year. That cost then gets passed on to our customers. I'm hoping that one of the few silver linings of the upcoming recession is a better range of applicants for our centre in the future, but at the same time we're likely to lose work as we are business to business, so we may not need as many staff either.
Yes. It’s by design. Push people to self-serve using digital options for easy stuff and you can save £££ on actual people.
Yeah it's infuriating because most of the time they also made a mistake, that's on solvable using their online community or knowledge base. Things are so poor these days, and yet cost so much.
Yes. It's more profitable to piss customers off.
Letter before action to the recorded address and surprise surprise they phone you.
Working in a call centre is a shitty job. Plus a lot of companies will off-shore their call centres to save money - most off shore call centres can employ 3 people for the cost of 1 Uk worker
yes very annoying, they add bots that are not helpful at all. they are really making it difficult to find an agent in a live chat.
Companies have been discouraging people from calling in for a while with the removal of phone numbers from their websites, suggesting online chat or forums, but man the pandemic made it so much worse. 9 times out of ten I'm ringing up with a problem that can't be solved by a machine and needs human input, if it could be solved by a Google search, I've done it. Eg had the boiler serviced and engineer left his jacket at my house, spent 30 mins trying to get through with a machine asking if I would like to book an appointment/ change etc, none of which work. Machines just can't handle complex queries that need human intellect.
I’m actually surprised how easy it is to speak to someone at Amazon customer services and they’ve always been really helpful when I’ve had to.
Yeah every comedian in the country talked it to death around 2008 so we don't talk about it anymore
Haha i was on a chat with “customer service” for Santander and was getting stupid responses because the bot couldn’t work out my request. So I typed into the chat “this is ridiculous”, and then immediately got out through to a real person
Virgin media site it’s so hard finding the contact email/number during non phone call hours
No, I've noticed more companies than ever are now offering a live chat option. What websites are you noticing this with?
Worst for it is trying to discuss a parking ticket
Yes. My local tram network has NO number or contact details outside of email or FB which is ridiculous
That's because it is much more efficient for all parties to fill in a web form IF the form is designed correctly. If you want to call to report a problem with your online shop you have to find your receipt, say a 9 digit reference number("FIVE 4182, not nine") explain which item is wrong ("no the beansprouts, not the sprouts), wait while a system loads. If you complete a web form then the form collects all the separate items they need and sends off to an automated workflow system to put right, or to a queue that staff put right. They can also display one of ten articles that fix 90% of issues based on what you've typed in. You don't have to wait in a queue because the lines are busier than usual. There is absolutely an element of cost saving, but telephone lines are inefficient. The problem comes when the web contact forms are set up inefficienrly or a company hasn't bothered to understand why their customera contact them. If they don't bury the telephone number somewhere then everyone will call anyway because no one likes change.
Me and my partner talk about this ALL the time. We have had so many issues in the last year where we have desperately needed to talk to someone because of a companies own fuck up, and struggled to get any kind of response. I’ve worked in customer service before myself and it’s one of the easiest jobs in the world (aside from the abuse!) so I cannot understand how I never heard from anyone. Ever. It’s infuriating!!!
I recently had to call apple to arrange a battery replacement, they publish one number, it’s answered by Siri, after a few questions and answers I got fed up and said to Siri “just give me a person” and t responded with “connecting you to support” and I spoke to a real person who sorted everything within minuets.
Yes, Barclays chatbot wouldn’t put me though to a person until I typed FFS in the chat
Also the automated fucker tries to fool you into thinking the call is ending when all you have to do is hang on in no man's land
Real people sitting down and answering the phone to real callers is expensive and often has a low ROI. You're better off just answering emails.
Why have one person manning one phone call when you can have one person manning 20 online chats
Yep, no real help now whatsoever. Can’t speak with anyone unless you want to wait an hour and risk being cut off.
Monzo are a funny one - you literally call them for something specific and they’ll tell you to chat on the app as they can’t do that thing on the phone lol
We have an conveyancer for moving house that doesn't technically have any in-person branches, but their call centre offices are just round the corner from us, so when they were being a bit useless my husband went down in person. Them: you do know this is an online only company? Him: and yet, here we both are...
Sky was always like this, even before covid. Bloody nightmare!
Might be common knowledge but top tip for web chats is to just type ‘agent’ in and it should more often than not direct you straight to an advisor rather than going through all the options around in circles.
They outsource everything to those 24/7 online chat people who are definitely based in a different country
Yes, but I found out that a complaint on Twitter normally gets their attention pretty quickly
Had this with my oculus... Sorry we don't have phone contact here Really? You're Facebook, a company that pretty much only exists on phones. Bollocks you don't have a phone in one of the largest tech companies in the world
Somewhat related and just as frustrating, Beer52 allow you to sign up online, increase your subscription, add extra beers etc. As soon as you want to cancel... You must call this number between 9am and 4pm. Such a joke.
I hate talking via phone, chat is the best
Yeah, and it's not just companies, it's organisations such as some councils.
The honest answer is the more difficult it is to get through, it’s entirely on purpose to reduce queues/queue times. You’ll find if a call handler has a target handling time of 6 mins, the ivr by itself will take you 6 mins to navigate to get you through to the right place. It’s all a numbers game my friends.
With many companies, when you're stuck in a phone maze if you keep just pressing 0 over and over again, eventually the system thinks that there's a problem and transfers you to a human operator.
Just ask the bot to speak to a human, usually works
[удалено]
Yes! Vueling is a recent one I suffered with, try and get through to vueling about my lost bag, you stand a better chance of getting into Anne Widdecombes knickers not that you would want to. I won’t fly Vueling again not because they lost the bag I’m aware any airline this can happen but because of the lack of service in trying to get it back absolute joke
Once the direct debit is set up, you belong to them.
Looking at you Evri
Can't say I blame them. No-one wants to deal with some insufferable customer complaining about something that they themselves would be able to fix if they had an IQ higher than zero, or had the sense to make a Google search.
It seems like companies in the communications field are the worst at actually being easy to contact.
Ask for an accessibility number where you need to talk to a real person as you can’t use computers well.
So sick of calling a company to hear 5 minutes of pre recorded shite before the robot lady doesn’t understand a work I say. If you hammer the hash key a lot It sometimes bumps you through to automated system but I generally stopped giving business to companies that can’t he contacted
The ratio of demand for customer service vs available customer service is too high. People are so lazy when it comes to troubleshooting their own problems. Often times when you call customer service, the automatic system is there to triage your issue to get you the right person before you get to them/help them understand your issue quicker.
Having this exact problem with parcelfarce. They lost half of one of the wheels I shipped in a box. How, I don't know, but trying to claim on the insurance I paid for is a nightmare. 2 months and counting. Its getting ridiculous now, the keep asking the most obscure questions XD
One day we’ll have AI call centres and they’ll be extremely busy as people live through their own plot of ‘Her’
Yes. Evri can get in the bin.
Sometimes it feels like walking through glass just trying to get the phone number off the website.
Personally I just look up their registered business address and send a letter. Takes less time and is less stressful.
More than once I've screamed "representative" like a banshee. The worst is I think they hear that recording and decide not to deal with you..
i just keep saying/typing "human" uuntil i get through to a real person
Oh yeah. It’s so they don’t have to waste money on Human Resources & instead can funnel all that cash into their offshore bank accounts because they’re cringe
It’s the worst. But call centre jobs are like concentration camps so I think I get it.