Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:
- Something interesting that happened to you
- Something humourous that happened to you
- Something frustrating that happened to you
- A quick question
- A request for recommendations
- Pictures of your pet
- A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
So how’s it going?
The problem is that if your internet is out you aren’t going to use their web site. Also their web sites are useless by and large. Even the chat feature has super long wait times. I once tried to use the chat with sky and I would wait fifteen minutes for somebody to start a chat and it would instantly crash and stop responding.
I think the assumption if you’d use you phone on mobile data to access the website if your internet is down. But yes, like you I’ve only had bad experiences.
Luckily our internet seems pretty stable these days. Occasional overnight brief loss of internet but I would never know if my fancy router didn’t tell me.
The point is why is there an hour wait just to speak to somebody.
Like most call centres, they have busy times and quiet times. The problem is, busy times are defined by the fact that most people are calling then. If 70% of people all try to call at the same time (lunch time, when the internet has gone out, etc) then 70% of people will get long wait times.
But from what I see there is no incentive to reduce wait times even it off peak periods. If you can call and have the phone answered right away then there are many people who will do this to find out their balance or what time they are open or other easily found information. As soon as your wait time is 20 minutes then you’ll see a huge drop-off in these calls and so you suddenly don’t need all those staff to answer those basic calls.
If you’re always seeing wait times of 20m or more, you’re most likely only calling at peak times. Calling outside those times will help.
Nothing will help long wait times when there is an unplanned widespread outage, except perhaps a mass text campaign to message everyone affected to tell them you know and are working on it - except you might not know who is affected until you’ve had time to investigate.
I just don’t understand the mentality of a business saying “we don’t want to talk to our customers”.
Seems like this could be done easily, even easier with email.
Money. They worked out the customers lost from this add up to less than the cost of having a short wait time.
Realistically it’s actually pretty difficult to identify exactly which individual houses are affected and them map that against customer accounts and then send an email to them all within a short time. I don’t see any reason why it should be that way, though. If they had their system set up so customers were previously mapped against certain local cables, cabinets, etc then they could identify the problem spot and trigger an email to all the potentially affected people. But again, such efforts would cost money. And I’d argue that money is better spent on reducing the number of outages.
If there is not a monopoly a business that provides better customer support should win in the marketplace.
regarding the second point. They already know the addresses of all their customers right?
For emailing customers, it’s not about their addresses but working out who is affected. Remember the ISPs don’t run the internet lines (largely this is Chorus). This is assuming they even know what the issue is early enough to tell people. By the time they work out where the issue is it may only be 2 minutes until service is restored.
In terms if the marketplace thing, we don’t actually have that much competition. Many of the medium sized companies are owned by one of the three big telcos.
Chorus has a map showing the outages and who is effected. Same for powerco.
It is my experience neither chorus nor powerco can fix any outage in less than six hours. My ISP says any outage will be fixed between 24 and 48 hours. They will not promise less than that.