I just thought that many of you might appreciate some of the sentiments being expressed about our favourite uk telecoms company over at this website. ;D

http://www.btsuck.org

Many here would in particular empathise with the contents of this thread:-

http://www.btsuck.org/?article=270

Here is another excellent article summarising all that is wrong not only with 0870 but also with other aspects of the cynical operation of most large uk customer services centres that use 0845 and 0870 numbers.

http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/crm/0,3800002402,39118208,00.htm

I would just like to say with all due respect that I DON'T empathize completely with that thread on btsuck.org!

Much of it is true and I agree with. But the anti-capitalist / let's bring back Arthur Scargill & Neil Kinnock / Socialism would work if it was only given another chance / Stalin was mis-understood / let's all live in communes bit I DISAGREE with.

Stuff like this is just silly.

Plus the article highly recommends http://www.thephone.coop/ as a much better phone company.

They do seem good - but they have an 0845 as their main contact number!!!! DOH!

wrote on Aug 28^th, 2005 at 3:36pm:

But the anti-capitalist / let's bring back Arthur Scargill & Neil Kinnock / Socialism would work if it was only given another chance / Stalin was mis-understood / let's all live in communes bit I DISAGREE with.

I didn't take the article to be either a Stalinist attack on all private business or on earning a profit in general.

I just took it as an attack on faceless multinationals who do not take into account the human dimension in customer service and customer relationships and do not seem to factor in the cost of customer alienation and customer dissatisfaction to basing their call centres in India.

If of course by operating in India I saw any sign that BT were actually going to be able to reduce their rip off quarterly line rental of £31.50 to the £10 a quarter it is worth (especially when you factor in the further hefty chunk in supporting that line's existence I pay through my £60 a quarter subscription for 2MB broadband) then I might of course be prepared to think differently.

I think to attack this article as stalinist and anti-capitalist was OTT.  I don't think this is where it was coming from.  I am a member of the Conservative party but I still hate Indian call centres because they do not deliver an acceptable level of customer service.  By all means make the product or develop the software in India, so long as it is quality controlled to Western standards, but don't route my call there unless you can find staff who are able to understand uk patterns of speech and also express normal forms of uk emotion and opinion in the course of a conversation.

PeDaSp you must surely also have agreed with the comments made in the Silicon article which were very much from a modern efficient business management perspective.

http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/crm/0,3800002402,39118208,00.htm

I agree entirely NGM,

I have not seen any "Arthur Scargill & Neil Kinnock / Socialism would work if it was only given another chance / Stalin was mis-understood / let's all live in communes...." bit here at all. Admittedly I have not read all of the earlier postings on this, but having gone some way back I would agree with everything here, and I have a decidedly anti-socialist view!

As someone having had specialist CRM experience also in large corporates I also agree entirely with the other article. This is exactly what large corporates, now managed by amateurs, fail to see completely. Their whole approach is that in their distorted view their customer is a nuisance, and their whole focus is on cutting supposed costs, which they do not have the necessary skills to actually understand,  to improve what they see as their "bottom line". The customer in their perspective is the fall guy to be exploited, so as to increase profits (quick-buck mentality only). CRM they see as a device to "tame" their customer to accept their way - including 0870 etc. disguised Premium numbers with queuing to increase their yield and make their job easier! Total nonsense of course, and the direct result of employing amateurs at a level requiring skilled and qualified professionals. (Did you know that hardly anyone holding a senior management position in the UK is a chartered manager? Quite frightening really. If we had the same situation with surgeons or accountants you can imagine what would happen?)

wrote on Aug 28^th, 2005 at 9:54pm:

Did you know that hardly anyone holding a senior management position in the UK is a chartered manager? Quite frightening really. If we had the same situation with surgeons or accountants you can imagine what would happen?)

My impression is that thess days customer services departments of many large companies are manned by those individuals that the company has rejected as being incapable of any more useful or skilled activity on the company's behalf.

Those with high level people skills are directed to work in sales whilst those with no people skills at all (other than in the sense of say a traffic warden or a prison warder) are directed off to customer services.

So far as I can tell the main objective of most customer services departments is to offer customers such a frustrating, expensive (0870 number + queues) and unrewarding experience that with time the number of customers making calls decline because they learn that it achieves nothing.

If I had my way dedicated career customer service people would not be allowed and instead the sales, marketing, research and engineering departments would all have their own small customer service function with people doing real jobs in the company then spending a year or so dealing with customers so that they remained in touch with customer views on the way the company was delivering that aspect of its services.

So far as I can tell the one stop catches all customer service centres established by large companies seem to be structured specifically so as to punish customers for daring to call them in the first place.  Thus the use of 0870 is just a logical further extension of the customer punishment process.

I don’t entirely agree with NGM.

Working in customer services is the first step to be coming a politician.  One has to be able to give a reply without answering any questions (I always ask a question in any correspondence with customer relations).  The next part of the training is to go on to answer the question that one hoped would be asked.  That is one route to becoming a politician.

As for salesmen, they are basically actors who (in many instances) attempt to sell something to people who do not really need it.  They are, in my opinion, economical with the truth and are certainly not able to tell the whole truth.

I’m sorry to be cynical but that’s my view of life.

End of moan for today!

wrote on Aug 29^th, 2005 at 12:10pm:

Working in customer services is the first step to be coming a politician.  One has to be able to give a reply without answering any questions (I always ask a question in any correspondence with customer relations).  The next part of the training is to go on to answer the question that one hoped would be asked.  That is one route to becoming a politician.

This is surely an absurd analogy.  The point of a customer services adviser is actually to deal with the customer's problem or issue.

If this is not what they are there for then the companies may as well close customer services down and replace them with a web interface for altering those facilities that they do choose to offer plus an FAQ explaining why they do not offer those facilities that customers would like them to offer.

At least then the product could be supplied at a cheaper price, even if many customers were still unhappy with the basic product.