I can fix it!

British Gas, I have gas and electric with them, rung twice in the last 2 weeks around 10am, needing to renegotiate the contract, waiting time around 3 minutes.
The AA is pretty good too. Haven't tried the bank recently.

ferry23

I waited over 20 minutes to get a live chat going this week - and after all that time I was told it wasn't something that could be resolved by live chat I needed to phone.

Gosh, that is surprising. I have never waited such a long time, about 5 mins maximum. When I first go on it will state there are 50 people etc. in front of you then like lightening, I am the number 1 in the queue. I never ring any company now, just use the chat box. Even Amazon, I use their chat box if an order is wrong or has not been delivered when promised and I am through immediately.

I cannot remember the last time I had to call a company on the phone.

Oh how I agree. My pet hate is " Your call is important to us.." which I feel should include the addendum " ..but not important enough to employ staff to take your call.."

It’s a catch 22 situation. After waiting so long it is difficult to be polite so companies have problems recruiting more staff which means waiting gets longer which means you are crosser so more staff leave……… not a job I would do.

It took me 30 minutes to get through to book patient transport. The recorded message kept saying, "all our operators are busy, please hold until an operator becomes available."
I know they deal with several hospitals in the area but surely they could employ more operators.

Just plain old common sense.. keep the customer on side..

I wonder why the customer services (misnomer if ever there was one) don't put it into practise

Banks are amongst the worse, just try and report something that needs urgent action. My last time of calling took them 45 mins to respond and then they could not resolve the issue. It ended up with two banks (needing further long-wait calls) each denying responsibility.

✖

That's not a No, it's an ✖ in the box voting for you ferry23!

ferry23

*The standard was that average call response time had to be between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. Heaven help the manager whose district, on average, took more than 2 minutes to answer calls. An average of under 30 seconds indicated over staffing.*

I think this must have now changed to between 30 minutes and 2 hours! Or in the case of BT, 2days

This was in the early 1990s.

I waited over 20 minutes to get a live chat going this week - and after all that time I was told it wasn't something that could be resolved by live chat I needed to phone.

ferry23

I really should be the CEO of one of our large utility suppliers.

BT, EDF, Sky, British Gas - you name it - I can fix it for you.

When customers phone you and every time they do so whatever day, whatever time, whatever month, whatever year they get a message telling them -

"We are experiencing a high volume of calls and it may take some time...blah blah blah"

they get really, really frustrated. Especially when their bills keep rising and your shareholders get richer.

I've got the answer!

Employ more staff and update your telephone system.

Thank you, have a nice day.

I find that the Chat lines are fantastic, never have to wait long and if you first get through to a BOT, type in, "I want to speak to a customer service rep", the BOT then puts you through to the next chat operator. I never have to wait longer than a few minutes and they always sort out the problem, I never ring them just use the Chat box.

Using the Chat Box is great if you are online and computer savvy but for the people who are not and that covers many of friends my age late 80's, it is a complete nightmare as they have to ring the companies.

Yes! Having spent an hour on hold yesterday - 30mins trying to get a hospital appointment and 30 mins to E-On, I support you in your bid to be CEO ferry23!

The standard was that average call response time had to be between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. Heaven help the manager whose district, on average, took more than 2 minutes to answer calls. An average of under 30 seconds indicated over staffing.

I think this must have now changed to between 30 minutes and 2 hours! Or in the case of BT, 2days

For the last 12 years of my working life I worked for British Gas, mainly on the overseas business but I spent 2 years in a UK Region. At that time all customer service calls were taken at local level and we monitored response times.

One of the factors feeding into a District Managers performance review was how long it took to reply to calls to Customer Service.

The standard was that average call response time had to be between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. Heaven help the manager whose district, on average, took more than 2 minutes to answer calls. An average of under 30 seconds indicated over staffing.

I occasionally think back to those glory days, What a good thing we couldn't look forward and see just how low BG and every other service utility could fall

But then they’d lose some of their profit . Too greedy to make it work but 100% agree with you

Haha! I agree

100% agree.