I have temped at a Virgin Mobile during my summer vacations from university for 3 years and I would like you to consider the merits or demerits of their charges, which I feel represent both sides of the coin here.

To call the call centre from a Virgin mobile costs 10p per call flat rate, however long the call lasts. The customer is not charged until the call connects to an operator at the call centre, so even though holding for half an hour on your mobile is extremely frustrating, it doesn't costs the customer a penny. We were told last summer that each call costs the company £2.20 to receive in terms of electricty, wages etc etc. We (the return temping staff) were encouraged to have an average call time of a certain amount (I have thought for a while about this and can't remember the exact time figure) and an average time spent between calls writing up notes of under 30 seconds. We were severely marked down in our fortnightly assessments if we did not reach these and other targets, and our employment terminated at a weeks notice if our performance was deemed to be "contrary to the customer good". Similar assesments were regularly carried out on full time staff. So far from I would assert that this is an extremely positive approach to customer service.

The downside is that calling the call centre from a landline can only be done via an 0845 number - unless you phoned Reception on a geographical number and ask to be transferred - which is, of course, more expensive per se and charges the caller as soon as you dial. However, the reality is that is very rarely happens because the only reason why you would do it is when your phone is not working at all. In turn, there are few reasons why a mobile phone would stop working.

Is that, in total, a fair method of charging the consumer? One possible way of looking at it is, why should I pay more for my calls and my phone in the first place when it is other people's phones who go wrong, and I have no problem with it at all? Not that that helps the person who has the misfortune to have the phone that goes wrong!


Rob

Redtreble wrote on Dec 13^th, 2005 at 4:29pm:


Sadly, many of those 0870 calls we pay for, are sent to an outsourced call centre.  So not only do we pay three times more for the call (or in my case, 35p per min during the day on my mobile) but we also are on the phone for three times as long, spelling out unusual words like "Birmingham".