Like most call centres, they have busy times and quiet times. The problem is, busy times are defined by the fact that most people are calling then. If 70% of people all try to call at the same time (lunch time, when the internet has gone out, etc) then 70% of people will get long wait times.

But from what I see there is no incentive to reduce wait times even it off peak periods. If you can call and have the phone answered right away then there are many people who will do this to find out their balance or what time they are open or other easily found information. As soon as your wait time is 20 minutes then you'll see a huge drop-off in these calls and so you suddenly don't need all those staff to answer those basic calls.

If you're always seeing wait times of 20m or more, you're most likely only calling at peak times. Calling outside those times will help.

Nothing will help long wait times when there is an unplanned widespread outage, except perhaps a mass text campaign to message everyone affected to tell them you know and are working on it - except you might not know who is affected until you've had time to investigate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I just don't understand the mentality of a business saying "we don't want to talk to our customers".

Nothing will help long wait times when there is an unplanned widespread outage, except perhaps a mass text campaign to message everyone affected to tell them you know and are working on it -

Seems like this could be done easily, even easier with email.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I just don’t understand the mentality of a business saying “we don’t want to talk to our customers”.

Money. They worked out the customers lost from this add up to less than the cost of having a short wait time.

Seems like this could be done easily, even easier with email.

Realistically it's actually pretty difficult to identify exactly which individual houses are affected and them map that against customer accounts and then send an email to them all within a short time. I don't see any reason why it should be that way, though. If they had their system set up so customers were previously mapped against certain local cables, cabinets, etc then they could identify the problem spot and trigger an email to all the potentially affected people. But again, such efforts would cost money. And I'd argue that money is better spent on reducing the number of outages.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Money. They worked out the customers lost from this add up to less than the cost of having a short wait time.

If there is not a monopoly a business that provides better customer support should win in the marketplace.

regarding the second point. They already know the addresses of all their customers right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For emailing customers, it's not about their addresses but working out who is affected. Remember the ISPs don't run the internet lines (largely this is Chorus). This is assuming they even know what the issue is early enough to tell people. By the time they work out where the issue is it may only be 2 minutes until service is restored.

In terms if the marketplace thing, we don't actually have that much competition. Many of the medium sized companies are owned by one of the three big telcos.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Chorus has a map showing the outages and who is effected. Same for powerco.

It is my experience neither chorus nor powerco can fix any outage in less than six hours. My ISP says any outage will be fixed between 24 and 48 hours. They will not promise less than that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

If it's really a case of Chorus providing a map and they just have to run their database of customers against the Chorus data... then there is really no excuse.