From Saturday's Daily Telegraph - see:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/04/21/dl2102.xml


Quote:

British Gas has admitted that its customer service performance is "not in a place where we want it to be". Thousands of its customers, meanwhile, are definitely in a place where they do not want to be: sitting with a phone stuck to their ear, listening to tinny music and endless assurances that help is on its way.

Quote:

Yet firms are constantly insisting that "we are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment" - which, if it happens day after day, must be some sort of lie. And then, once you get through, there is the joy of talking to a succession of people, each of whom asks for the same information. Meanwhile, the company thoughtfully punctuates the process with mind-numbing loops of songs belonging to the genre ironically known as "easy listening".

The article singles out British Gas, but it is a great pity that the author didn't look a little deeper into the underlying cause of this irritation. Of course they keep you hanging on and listening to tinny music - they are stealing money from you whilst you sit and fume!

Perhaps some of the regular posters to this site would like to add a comment to the Telegraph story? It might even start them investigating the greatest telephone rip-off in the 'first world'!