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ntl wins slowest call centre award
# 8 September 2004, 21:01 by Frank
For the past few years ntl have been banging on about how their statistics show massive improvements in call centre waiting times, but unfortunately the Mystery Shopper from The Daily Mirror found otherwise!
Straight from Monday’s Daily Mirror by way of Richard M
The telecoms giant proudly advertises itself as “Better Choice, Better Value”. But after the extraordinary delays we suffered, a more appropriate slogan for the cable firm would be: “Better hang up..!”ntl’s national helpline kept us waiting almost an hour. When – after 15 minutes – our first attempt to speak to an operator looked like succeeding, she kindly hung up. To make sure we got the message, she put the phone down again after our second attempt 20 minutes later. Thankfully, after our third call, we were answered and even helped.
“It’s really busy at the moment,” the operator explained. “There have been some changes in the call centres recently – but they seem to have made things worse.”
Waiting time: 50mins 12secs
To be quite fair, we must point out that this wait time appears to have been the sum of three calls – two failed and one successful – which were clearly due to “technical difficulties”.
ntl protagonists were quick to point out on our forum that the tests were unfair because all the call centers were not averaged, which is really quite irrelevant because the tests are random for all the participating call centres.
ntl competitor British Telecom answered in a number of seconds, according to The Mirror article. That is just so unfair…