John Linton
......not more productive but just busier?
A peculiar situation has arisen over the last few days - we are receiving far more telephone calls with 'sales enquiries' than we did at this time last year. This has reached the point where the physical number of telephone lines we use for incoming sales and support and account queries has reached saturation point on several occasions on each day and call wait times have shot up from an average of three minutes to an average of over 15 minutes since the start of 2009. This is, of course, a very bad situation for the people calling (and the people answering the calls) and one we have never faced before.
We are putting in a 'crash' program to address this current issue but this time of year is not the best period to get additional telephone lines installed in a hurry nor to to do anything else as most of our suppliers are still at 'holiday staffing levels' and it takes a very long time to do anything. I don't know what has suddenly caused a 50% increase in our inbound call volumes at a time of year when they have dropped by 60% in each of the past four years. The vastly increased number of telephone calls are for sales type enquiries and while our actual volume of orders for all types of services have increased noticeably from this time last year they certainly haven't increased enough to explain the 'massive' increase in inbound 'sales' calls.
Compounding this problem of a large increase in the number of calls is the increase in 'talk time' per call. I have no information on the content of the calls other than anecdotally but it must indicate that the callers are seeking more complex information or are less technically aware than in the past or a combination of both plus all sorts of other factors. Whatever it is it seems to point, at least in this particular 'flurry', to a different type of prospective customer contacting Exetel which is quite worrying in some respects.
My assumption has always been that as ADSL becomes more widely used the 'technical' competence of the average user becomes better and therefore requires less 'question asking' and 'hand holding'. My assumption therefore was that as tie passed the number of "what modem do I need" and "how do I set up my email" level of sales calls would rapidly disappear and, as far as I can determine, it has done exactly that over the past five years. In my estimations this would have lead to the majority of customers for ADSL services already having an ADSL set up and already being familiar with how their modem/routers operate and how ADSL operates generally. For almost five years the call volumes received by telephone have tracked these assumptions pretty much as expected. Howeverthe huge increase over the past 10 days has no rational explanation that I can see.
THis is proving to be the case with a majority of new Exetel customers coming from other ISPs via the ADSL1 or ADSL2 'churn' processes. However this should have resulted in less sales calls rather than the steep increase we have seen since the beginning of the year which when I now look back was becoming evident over the last quarter of 2008. I initally, and probably still, ascribed the 2008 increase in sales calls to the interest in the HSPA services which would be 'new' to even more experienced broad band users but I can't explain the surge over the past few days to interest in HSPA.
Perhaps it's just that people are on holidays with more time on their hands and have decided to do some 'research' on a possible new ADSL provider if things get worse financially and they need to reduce their broad band costs? I suppose that could be a contributing factor but, like every other 'sudden' scenario it will turn out to be a combination of many different factors including a gradual increase that has gone unnoticed. I could do without yet another issue to resolve at the moment but it seems to be a complex combination of many issues that will need sensible examination before a decision is made on what should be done.
The only worrying issue, to me, is whether this 'surge' will continue in terms of sales calls. Exetel has pursued a policy, for want of a more appropriate word, of not having 'residential' sales telephone answering to the point that, some two years ago, we didn't have an IVR option to talk to sales if you called Exetel. I'm seriously considering returning to that set up and will discuss it with the various people concerned over the week end. Perhaps, as I've become too busy over the past year or so, I've neglected to improve/simplify/clarify the information on the web site as much as I used to do and it has become less clear than in the past. Clearly there are far more services and options now which is inevitable but also obviously creates less clarity.
I don't want the costs and problems of setting up a dedicated residential sales team at this late stage of Exetel's life - it goes against everything we have tried to do. We will need to find a better solution if the current call volume continues.