You might think that with the all the problems in the world of commerce at the moment, businesses would be falling over themselves in a bid to answer your call and please you so you don’t leave them. It seems ironic that the customer services arm of most businesses seems anything but that. A survey of UK consumers commissioned by online insurance firm Swiftcover.com found that 91% of callers were dissatisfied with the length of time waiting to get through to a call centre. A rise of more than 10% since a similar survey was carried out in 2005.
In the 2005 survey, 1 caller in every 20 experienced a wait of more than an hour – while in the latest survey the waiting time had increased to a staggering 2 hours for 5% of the respondents. Swiftcover also reported that after managing to get through half of all callers are regularly put on hold for half an hour while 80% have found themselves cut off after waiting 10 minutes or more.
The Mirror also reported on the different answering times for financial institutions, putting HSBC on top with a pick up time of 15 seconds while HBOS limped to the telephone after an outrageous 23 minutes and 30 seconds. Which is the one that almost went bust?
Interested to find out how the survey producers faired, we called Swiftcover themselves. The pickup time was 2 seconds … before being placed automatically on hold. After having our brain massaged for 90 seconds by the type of nondescript ‘music’ that one has to endure when dealing with call centres we were fooled into thinking that we had been put through, before our hopes were dashed by the following words:
“We know you didn’t call us to be placed on hold but we are giving someone the same personalised service we will be giving to you shortly.”
After 3 minutes 30 seconds our call was answered – not a bad time, but exasperated by the horrible music.
We checked to see if any of the leading insurers offered a “call back” service — very few did. In addition, only 11 out of the 20 insurers we checked offered free phone numbers for existing customers:
- Sainbury’s Insurance Existing Customers 0845 608 6034
- Aviva All Enquiries 0800 092 9564
- Barclays All Enquiries 0800 068 8097
- Liverpool Victoria All Enquiries 0800 756 8022
- Endsleigh General Enquiries 0800 028 3571
- Legal and General All Enquiries 0800 027 7161
- Sheila’s Wheels Customer Services 0845 604 3550 (cost per minute not specified)
- Nat West Customer Services 0800 200 400
- The AA Customer Services 0800 197 6169
- Direct Line Customer Hotline 0845 246 8702 (3p per minute)
- More Th>n Customer Services 0800 072 4186
- Prudential Customer Services 0845 607 0547 (local rate)
- Halifax Customer Services 08457 23 33 43 (2p per minute plus 7p connection fee)
- Hiscox Customer Services 0845 330 0505 (cost per minute not specified)
- Zurich existing policy holders 0870 902 1282 (1.27 p/min up to 6.39p/min depending on when you call)
- Cooperative Insurance Customer Services 08457 464 646 (4p per minute)
- Tesco Customer Services 0845 300 4400 (2p per minute plus 6p connection fee)
- RAC Customer Services 0800 404 6342
- Nationwide Customer Services 0800 30 20 10
- Esure Customer Services 0845 603 7874 (cost per minute not specified)
- Privilege Customer Services 0800 051 6990
Why the wait? Can’t these cash-rich insurers simply bring on more staff? If you read the news it seems that insurers are firing more and more people each day. Some, most particularly Norwich Union, have shifted some call centres to India — though in some cases this has been a disaster, with Britons complaining (politically correctly or not) about accents or general lack of knowledge about how things work and lifestyles in Britain.
What insurers implicitly want you to do is use their online services – not only for purchases but for customer service issues. As we’ve noted previously, online operations save insurers enormous amounts of money: this is why even big, traditional brands commonly offer incentives if you mainly do business with them online.
But as far as we can tell, very few of you want to send emails back and forth about an accident.
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