Stuart Herbert

This is my week of unemployment, before taking up my new job with Gradwell.com.  I was hoping just to chill out and spend the week out and about with my camera, but there just hasn’t been any time for that.  I’m beginning to understand what some of my students mean when they talk about how their retirement is going!

After fun with the call centres on Monday, I dug my old bike out of the shed and headed up the Taff Trail for some much-needed exercise.  I made it all the way up to the Abercynon Feeder bridge, which is pretty good going for my first bike ride in a couple of years!  Then it was cook tea for Kristi before collapsing in a heap.

Yesterday went on my Tai Chi class prep.  I bought a Samson AirLine 77 wireless mic system a while back, so that I could record an audio lesson for my students.  Took the CDs down to the class last night, and hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll get some good feedback to help me plan a v2. Also learned yesterday that one of my students passed away recently  More on that this evening when I update my Tai Chi blog.

This morning, and it was back to dealing with Demon and BT.  I checked with the bank, and neither organisation had provided the refunds that they had promised.  

I found this particularly amusing rant about Demon’s poor customer service, and whilst I don’t necessarily agree with his refusal to call their support line to get his MAC code, I have to say that his experiences with Demon largely mirror my own.  Now I just need to do some research and decide who to switch my broadband service to.  Sky is tempting, because it’s cheap, but I’m very happy to pay more in order to get a fixed-rate service.  I’m currently looking at the service from ukfsn.org.

BT got a letter of complaint.  I can’t remember the last time I wrote a snail-mail letter.  Anyone else unhappy with BT may find their Consumer Code of Practice to be a useful guide, especially their escalation procedure.  I’ll write more here when they respond.

As with Monday, it’s difficult to overstate the difference in contrast between Demon and BT, with their poor customer service, in the one corner, and other companies who do provide excellent customer service.  On Monday, it was Lloyds TSB showing how to do this, and today it was Hardware.com.  My brand new Cisco router has died  A quick chat with Anthony @ Hardware.com, and it was agreed that I should return it for a replacement.  Whilst it’s a shame the product turned out to be faulty, the way a company puts problems right makes a huge difference!

This afternoon, it’s get the shopping done, and then decide which dish to cook for when Kristi gets home from work.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it out to get some photography done!

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 …