John Linton ....and getting up at 5 am to take my youngest son and one of his friends to the airport has allowed us to enjoy as much of it as will be possible. We thought of having breakfast on the way back from the airport but nothing was open which surprised me as we live in a suburb that has a large number of coffee places - apparently 6.15 am is too early for Sunday trade.....
.....but not too early for some people to send me irate emails complaining they had to wait "an unconscionable time for their support call to be answered" - at 4.30 am on a Sunday morning - and "what was I going to do about it". So I emailed the complainant back, at around 6 am with, what I thought was a reasoned explanation. Apparently it was neither reasoned nor reasonable because it produced a vitriolic reply which I can't begin to reproduce here - this being a 'family blog site'. My reply to his original complaint was:
"Dear Sir,
I apologise for the 50 minute delay before your call for support was answered earlier this morning. Over the past three months Exetel has changed the focus of providing support for residential users from answering each support call in under sixty seconds and then advising the customer on how to resolve their issues and asking them to call back if they were still having problems to staying on the line while the customer goes through our advice step by step until the problem is resolved.
Our previous process provided the fastest response to a support call possible but the majority of callers had to call back at least once and some times twice before their problem was resolved. The average elapsed time to get a customer experiencing a problem 'back on the air' was something like three or more hours compared to the current process which gets a service (that doesn't require work by the carrier) 'back on the air' in an average of less than 40 minutes (wait time plus fix time).
We believe providing a 'back on the air' support service of less than 40 minutes (for over 80% of callers) is significant improvement over getting a customer 'back on the air' is around three hours. Over the coming months our aim it to progressively reduce the average 'back on the air' time to 20 minutes and to do this for 90% of callers rather than the current 80%.
Once again I am sorry you had to wait longer this morning than our planned time to get your service restored."
I don't know what 'wait times' are experienced in residential ADSL or other services around Australia so I can't comment on what a good or bad fix time is for a fix to customer generated problems that have nothing to do with the supplier's service but almost always are caused by customer ineptitude and problems trouble shooting equipment purchased from other entities. We do have a goal of fixing 95% of all customer problems within 20 minutes of 'first ring' by June 30th this year but I have nothing to base those targets on other than I believe is both possible and reasonable.
My unscientific testing of other residential ADSL suppliers support answer times shows long queue times are the norm (longer than those currently experienced on Exetel's support lines) and I obviously have no idea how competent the CSR who answers the call is. Our interest in moving away from 'provide the customer with advice on how to fix their problem if it is not Exetel related' to 'fix all customer problems irrespective of whether they are Exetel related or not' is a first step in providing a different level of support for small business ADSL users rather than to residential ADSL users.
While this 'fix on first call' approach clearly didn't please the person who wrote to me earlier this morning, and quite possibly a percentage of other customers, we think it is a much better way of providing support to the majority of our customers.
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PS: 50 more reasons why Democracy is useless (I particularly liked the Indiana entry)
http://www.divinecaroline.com/22323/99603-