Jananas

My recent shift to using my cellphone as my primary phone (having cancelled my house line) and previous call centre experiences with companies like Bell or the City of Toronto whose call centres are only open during business hours (let’s assume 8:30am-4:30pm like the City is), led me down the following path. Cellphone plans generally have a limited number of day time minutes per month. If when calling some of these major service providers or municipalities customers have to wait 20-30 minutes to reach an agent (a wait time, which although long is not particularly rare), customers may chew through a significant portion of their monthly allotment of day time minutes. From the customer’s perspective, it is an extra layer of frustration that will be reflected in their interactions with the company and the CSR.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but it would seem that the more people switch to cell phones the more pressure companies are going to face to limit the amount of time that customers spend on hold. Whether it means more goodwill gestures (not to cover not only the company’s mistake, but also the time & real monetary cost of waiting @ $0.30/minute), but I also wonder if it means a shift in when call centres are open to reflect the times that major cellphone providers offer unlimited evening calling. For example, the CIty of Toronto’s call centre would have hours before 7am (or 8am) and after 9pm so that customers would be able to call in without having to pay to do so. Although, in companies that aren’t concerned with customer experience and satisfaction this could well go the other way; the companies could welcome this increased customer annoyance as a way to further reduce the number of customers who call in.

I have no idea where this idea would fall out (assuming that companies recognize it and act upon it), but it popped into my head this morning and I figured that I’d get it down on paper (or blog as the case may be) before I forgot. And now, off to school for a 7.5 hour class.