Halfway through the football, my broadband connection gave out. I’m using PAYG at the moment, so I ran out at halftime and topped up. 3’s website was running verrrry sloowwwwly, but by the time that Our Boys were back on the pitch, I’d input my voucher number. But I still had no credit.
It took me nearly five minutes to get through to a human being at 3. I had to choose what I was calling about, and a submenu, and a sub-submenu, and input the number I was calling about, and hold for an advisor. And when I got an advisor, I had to explain the problem three times, and then she had to transfer me to her technical team, and he had to take my number again, and I had to explain the problem twice more (I was really running out of ways to explain that the internet was gone!). And then he told me: oh, the PAYG system is down. I said “how many times have you said that this afternoon?” He laughed, and said “yes, lots of times.”
Here’s an idea. If you know there’s a problem, put it at the front of the phone menu. “Welcome to 3; if you can’t top up your PAYG broadband, we know there’s a problem and we’re working on a fix. We expect it to be fixed in the next hour. Press 1 for…” etc. etc.
If you know there’s a problem, disseminate information about it. Have a system that’s flexible enough that you can do this. Give out estimated fix times – but more than anything, don’t make your customers work and waste their time to find out that you already know there’s a problem. (eBay, you could listen to this.)
5 Responses
Sue,
The only problem with ebay doing this is that it would take ages to even get to the IVR menu as it would take at least 30 mins for them to tell u about the many faults the site is currently having – lol
Oh well dont worry about the match u didnt miss much except for us to hold our heads in shame – Just driving down the rd b4 and all the england flags have been took off everyones cars – oh well lets hope we do better at tennis – lol
Problem? What problem?
eBay never ever ever front up wih a problem till its next to meltdown.
It is an abuse of their dominant position in the marketplace.
They (eBay) will someday regret that abuse.
You should try BT: our Internet connection was down on Friday. I phoned the helpline only to hear a recorded message as follows:
“If you are having problems accessing the Internet, visit http://www.bt.com to check whether there are known network problems in your area.”
A class act, BT.