Stuart Herbert

I’ve spent the last hour on the phone to three different call centres, chasing up a mixture of owed money and missing goods.  Two of the call centres were offshore (presumably in India), whilst the third was here in the UK.  The contrast between them was substantial, and worth looking at if you’re interested in customer service.

1. The first call centre was Demon’s, which is offshore.  Unfortunately, the call quality was terrible, and I was unable to progress my query with the lady at the other end.  Thankfully, Demon’s helpdesk is also available via email, otherwise I’d really be stuck there.
2. The second call centre was BT’s, which is also offshore.  The call quality was fine, but the lady at the other end wasn’t empowered to assist me with my query.  The systems she had access to required her to submit an internal query to another department - a process which quotes 5-7 working days for acting on a query. She did escalate my call to her supervisor at my request, and after some discussion her supervisor agreed to resolve my query today.  This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that from BT about this specific issue, so the jury’s still out about that.
3. The third and final call centre was LloydsTSB’s, which is here in the UK.  Fine call quality, and the phone answered by someone who not only seemed to have all she needed to resolve my two queries, but who also didn’t sound like she was reading from a script every time she answered a question.

I really feel for the folks out in India.  We don’t just seem to offshore the jobs themselves, but also we seem to send bad practices out there too (reading from scripts all of the time), and we don’t seem to give them the tools they need to do their job (poor call quality, no empowerment, and inefficient secondary processes).  I’m very impressed at their professionalism - in general, folks in India are educated to a very high level, and it can’t be easy having to do such a mundane job with poor practices and systems.  I somehow can’t imagine a UK-based call centre managing the same level of professionalism under the same circumstances.

I wonder what the quality of these three experiences this morning says about the management responsible for each of these services?

I do know what it says about the UK’s Direct Debit scheme.  Two of these companies (Demon and BT) owe me money, because they’ve used the Direct Debit scheme to over-bill me.  I’m seriously thinking of cancelling my Direct Debits with both firms, and paying them directly when their bills arrive instead.  Unfortunately, BT is still an effective monopoly, but at least I can cancel my Demon account and take my business elsewhere …