At Eclipse Marketing we were stunned to hear of the contact centre response times quoted by the BBC One Watchdog programme recently.

Watchdog made 100 calls to each of five companies – Sky, 3, BT, Vodafone and Tiscali – timing the calls from finishing dialling, to when a human voice was heard. The fastest by far was 3, with an average of one minute 39 seconds before they got through. The quickest single call of all was to Vodafone, who put them through to a human in 50 seconds.

But even this wasn’t even good enough, when compared to Eclipse Marketing where the average wait time is just 15 seconds.

However, some of the waits for BT and Sky were truly horrifying. At BT one wait lasted 24 minutes and 47 seconds, but the longest single wait of all was for Sky who took 29 minutes and 33 seconds before cutting them off.

Cutting customers off was a trend observed by Watchdog, with a third of calls to Vodafone disconnecting before they had a chance to speak to anyone, and 30 out of 100 calls made to Sky were disconnected.

Watchdog had so many problems with Sky that they made an extra call to them; just in case they were having a couple of off-days. The result was that Sky kept them waiting for a massive two hours and ten minutes.

These results prove that, along with the economy, customer service has got worse. Big companies are keeping customers on hold longer and sometimes cutting them off completely. The results are simply unacceptable, as one of the ways companies drive customers away is by not answering the phone quick enough. This is not a great idea, especially during the recession

As featured on bbc.co.uk.

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