Customer Service - It's a System Problem

I watched the BBC TV Watchdog programme on Monday 4th May and was amazed at some of the comments from BT, 3, Sky and Tiscali, all communications companies that the programme investigated over their answering of telephone calls. Sky was the winner with a wait time of 2 hours and 10 minutes!

What perplexed me about the responses was that all the call waiting issues were blamed on technology and not on call volumes. BT's system was slower than normal due to a recent system upgrade and the ensuing teething problems. Sky apparently could not take calls for a WHOLE day due to a telecoms problem. 3 had also just recently upgraded their systems and were experiencing problems.

Well, the programme made 100 telephone calls to each company over 3 days, and to me it is an amazing coincidence that several of them upgraded their systems at the same time!

So, two things were lacking. Either, the companies didn't have enough call centre operatives or they can't scale their call centre IT systems, to handle the call volumes. Based on their responses to the programme, the latter seems to be the 'problem'.

If I.T. was to blame then you don't do a system upgrade that is going to give you a worse system performance or roll out a system that hasn't been capacity tested. Similarly, all these communications companies shouldn't do their upgrades at the same time! Maybe they need to consider running Software-as-a-Service applications and or utilising Cloud Computing, both of these paradigms are designed to be highly scalable, resilient, responsive and have SLA's of at least 99.9%. If I was the managing director of these companies I'd be asking awkward questions of the CTO/CIO.

But why don't the companies admit, having seen the programme and all their responses, that it's a manpower issue and maybe there might be a system performance issue as a secondary cause. Their reasons for failure are too similar for them to be real.