Call Centres Returning to the UK
February 14th, 2007 by Stephen
The BBC carries an article about call centres returning to the UK. It seems that there has been a consumer backlash against outsourced support centres, with a mere 4% of those surveyed having had a positive experience of one of these.
Quite right too. I have cancelled all my contracts with BT over their abysmal customer service, exacerbated by hours on a call begging that a fault be escalated with them (and not with Microsoft as they stupidly suggested I do – see my letter to BT here for the gruesome details). These call centre staff are on a script, which perhaps works fine when the problem you have is something the script resolves. They are like Microsoft help. Sometimes it does help, but usually you go through trying suggestion after suggestion until you get “Microsoft help was unable to resolve this problem”.
And then, if you are lucky, they will finally escalate your fault. But don’t hold your breath – my experience is that they unstead just forget about you, and when you phone again, the cycle starts over again.
It is not just BT. Wanadoo, Tiscali, and various other companies have put me through this kind of telephone tennis. But we fool ourselves if we think the problem is resolved simply by bringing call centres back to the UK.
The problem is the whole concept of outsourced support and centres. Whether they are in Bombay or Birmingham makes little difference. If the call centre is not in a position to actually resolve your problem then they are just in the way.
Pipex Homecall has UK based customer support, but a look at Their gripe sites shows that people are not enamoured with their customer support either. The company seems to have a policy of deliberately preventing customers from speaking with people who can make real decisions, and the response is stories of people standing in the rain to get a mobile signal whilst they beg, scream and cry for the company to send an engineer to fix their fault!
So I am not holding my breath for great improvements in customer service. My best tip is to patronise smaller comapnies, where customers are important to the service providers. Small is beautiful, so they say.
