The next time you call up the customer hotline service of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for assistance or enquiry, you stand a good 95 percent chance of getting through successfully.
The Consumer Council has just completed a survey to measure the performance (i.e. waiting time) of customer service hotlines of four major ISP operators in Hong Kong, in light of the many consumer complaints against the telecom industry.
The results indicated a welcome improvement of their customer hotline service, often the cause of consumer dissatisfaction if not properly handled.
The survey measured specifically the time taken between the last key pressed by the tester and the call picked up by customer service staff at the other end of the hotline. 160 calls in total were made with 40 calls per operator.
A high rate of 152 calls (95%) was answered by the ISP operators: 80.9% were promptly picked up by the customer service staff within 30 seconds while 10.5% of the calls between 31 and 60 seconds.
The remainders: three calls drew blank after a waiting time of more than five minutes; another five calls requested the callers to leave message, and in these cases only one returned call the next day while the other four remained unreturned after three days.
During the survey, it was found that the customer service staff had to refer the calls to other divisions/departments but the waiting time for some of these referrals could last a significant long time of more than two minutes.
ISP operators are urged to empower their staff to widen their scope in customer hotline service.
In some cases, it is rather difficult for customers to locate the right "contact customer service person" in the telephone system. The call flow of the system will need to be more user-friendly.
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