The strange death of the company phone number
“We have removed our telephone number,” said a note on the website of a photography business I needed to contact in a hurry last week.
“It’s because we’ve noticed customers prefer to chat online, via email or by filling in the form below,” it added.
Yeah, right, I thought, as I grumpily filled in the online form and hit “submit”, sending my query off to some digital netherworld where I doubted it would be seen by anything as costly as a human.
We all know why this happens. People are expensive. For Covid-battered businesses, cost efficiency is crucial. A lot of queries can be easily answered online. Nuisance calls are rife.
Still, a backlash is taking shape. Spain this year moved to require companies to answer customer calls within three minutes, with a flesh-and-blood employee, and similar efforts are afoot in the UK. The question is, why don’t more companies seize on the deepening fury about clueless customer service and make a competitive virtue of offering better support?
I wondered about this earlier this year on a visit to Australia, where the Telstra telecommunications group was boldly advertising its decision to bring all its call centres back home. The move follows years of complaints from fed-up customers, which can become especially acute during big floods and other weather disasters that have battered the country in recent years.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Pilita Clark
