This Cellular Company was launched in Pakistan couple of years back. So far it has become effective competitor in the context of subscriber base and the revenue share as well.
Company is best known for its corporate social responsibility, human resource management techniques and some other characteristics, but today I want to point out some loopholes, which are there, and are required to be rectified.
Customer Services:
When the word “Customer services” come to one’s mind, it is meant as quality, delicateness, complete information, courtesy, smile, obliging, problem resolutions and maximum network coverage etc.
However, with this company, if you are frequent caller than it may even dare to block your help-line access quota and may you get message that you will contacted shortly or “All operator are busy” and so on.
They need to pay attention towards IVR procedures and caller help line scheduling to provide maximum customer services on the 24/7 available helpline.
Agents are in Hurry:
Most of the time, if you are asking for another question, agent will adopt a tone, that will might give you feeling that “Agar iss say bad koi question poocha to number block kar donga”.
There is no courtesy like “Sir, iss k ilwa kuch poochnay chahyen gain”, instead they give an impression “Thanks for hanging up, Sir”.
Quality Monitoring:
There quality monitoring teams have settled that much odd KPI’s to determine the agent performance that agents do not even care about how they are talking or how they are dealing with customers.
Customer Service Centers:
The customer service center staff is more casual and will give you more casual comments.
This article is not to criticize but to provide 100% wake up call for those telco’s who are still having dreamed to win the customers without having emphasis on customer services and customer delight programmes. They need to bring new innovations and competitive edge in customer services program, because future will only support those telco’s who will concentrate on customers’ delight rather than Pooraa PAAraa..
I think you are right here Aamer. I have been in the customer services business for the last 6 years and been in all three roles (CS officer, Supervisor and QA). I have worked for a CS providing company in the US, a multinational real estate business in pakistan and a telco. i have strong relations with people with the same role in other companies including telco’s . i know for a fact that KPI’s like the shortest call, always concentrating on ending the call in a polite manner (hardly ever happens) and extremely precise information, which often means ‘say anything that will satisfy the customer, wrong or right doesn’t really matter’ are in great play.
Unfortunately, as you said, customer always has a feeling that the guy im talking to wants to just end the call. the information at hand is limited also. one MAJOR problem that i faced was the call backs to the customers. according to the international CS standard rules, any request that comes in from a customer MUST be followed up, regardless of it was a resolution on first call or a back-up support like 2nd or 3rd tier support. this never happens here.
i happened to apply for PTCL student package at home for my brother. there was some fault with the request logged in the system and nothing happened for days. despite my calling and reminding them literally every day. no one bothered to make a follow up call. now the biggest disadvantage of this is that if i call for the same issue again, its a new guy/girl i have to speak with and explain everything. in case of a follow up, the caller would definately already know what the problem was and would be in a better position to solve it.
in short, i was so tired of the CS support quality in our country and the kind of mindset our customer services ‘heads’ have, that i finally decided on quitting and changing fields.
not sure how many of such experienced people do they lose for such problems alone….
goodluck to paki CS. :)
@Tarang300, Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the topic…!
I want to add just one thing, that call centers in our country, especially the telco’s should have a information system to keep root level tracking of customers, for example, for each connection company should know how many idle days this connection has spent, what amount of on-net calls, off-net calls, help-line calls and so on… are associated with a specific number.
This way, they can track all the complaints made by a specific customers, and through history CSRs can not only better tackle the situation but they can almost read the mind of customers with utmost satisfaction.
I believe investment in this area will not ease customer’s lives but companies can earn their trust and loyalty as well.
See, we have got the number of heads (160 million above) now anyone providing the service with support will win the game…
Thanks Reality Bites for initiating the topic, and hope our CS heads are in the radar.
How about mentioning the name of the company instead of beating about the bush? Are refering to zong? If that is the case then I have had very different experience with them. I only called their help line once and the answers I got to my questions were quite polite and not rushed at all. In fact they were rather long winded almost like memorized ads. I can’t believe that any telco call center employee will want to give short answers now that they have started charging for help line usage.
@abdussamad, well, first for your helpline charges, as per my understanding from article , call help line charges does not bother Call center agents for prolonging the calls n all that..
and this is 100% fine that RB not mentioned the name coz this will effect their competitive edge ..however, this article can be useful for every telco..what to do with name….
I think u are refering to Telenor in your article. Well they have outsourced most of there Customer Support to a local company which is paying a salary that is 1/3rd of what telenor was paying to its CSRs, now considering the price war between the telcos the area to suffer the most will be Customer Support
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i think good and bad customer services depends on two things: the company’s idea behind customer services and how its leaders (not managers) create the trickle down efffect in the CSRs. second and more important is the dedication of an individual CSR towards their JD. it is not easy to receive calls all day long, keep telling the same thing to the customers and receving same old questions everyday. there is not much learning in a call center environment. its just a repetition of what you did your first day. when you become adept with the information you have on you, you start taking it for granted. it is then that the quality start deteriorating. it is for the leaders to keep rotating the job descriptions in a way that they can create learning as well as rotating opportunities for individuals. it is not a job as easy as it seems over the phone. trust me: it is more serious than CSR’s think it is. its not just about satisfying customers, it is about follow up and absolute satisfaction.