Since we're on the subject, I thought I'd take the opportunity to tell you folks
in other countries how common poor customer service is in the UK.Banks, telecoms
companies, utility companies, any large firm with lots of locations etc have all
adopted call centres, and since that point have gone way down hill. Everything in
these places is logged and monitored against benchmarks stats for measuring 'efficiency'.
I
know from first hand knowledge that in most of these companies that the efficiency
of employees in the call centre is monitored primarily on the average length of calls
they are dealing with. The quicker, the more efficient in their selfish and deluded
logic.
What has happened is that you regularly get cut off before you even get
to speak to someone - a load of 1 second calls boosts their averages. Also the people
constantly want to end the call, and are reluctant to deal with a query thoroughly,
anmd you often get passed around departments in a circle.
A friend of mine who
worked in a bank was told by his boss 'I don't care how you get rid of customers-
fobb them off, pass them on to another department - it doesn't matter, just get rid
of them as quickly as possible.'
These are every day companies- companies I need
to contact on a regular basis, and have done for years. As more and more things in
society are taken over by extreme capitalist cost-cutting culture, I see everyday
life suffering in ways that it did not before.
I hope these companies don't follow
the email support model adopted by many registrars- I waited nearly a week for a
response from Registrer.com, and even then it did not answer my question- i suspect
they have to get through 300 emails per day to be efficient or something, same old
problem.