EE, Britain's largest mobile operator, has introduced the ability to jump the queue on their customer service lines if the caller pays 50p. The controversial move is called "Priority Answer" whereby customers will be greeted with an automated message asking if they would like to pay the fee in order to get straight through to an operator.
Some outcry has been caused by the move due to EE's ability to delay customers getting through to an operator without paying money for the privilege. The network has 28 million customers in the UK and was formed through a partnership between T-Mobile and Orange.
Waiting in a queue is never the highlight of anyone's day; whether it's a wait in the post office or being glued to your phone. It's especially frustrating when you are in desperate need of assistance. A quick poll across our social networks asking whether you would cough-up the 50p charge has split opinion but more participants are unhappy with the move.
Many companies today are expected to provide customer support via social media. The advantage here is that all correspondence is in the public domain and service can be scrutinised accordingly with poor service likely to cause a backlash against the company. One respondent to our poll who is against paying for extra privileges says he would take to Twitter for this reason:
EE say they will be using the money to improve its service - we hope this includes enough operators to support the queue jumpers or we worry what's next. For example, would anyone be willing to pay £1 to jump the 50p jump queue? This is a concern echoed by another one of our respondents:
Twilio, who offer Cloud-based solutions for communications, believes EE are facing capacity issues which would be better solved through virtualising their call centres. TelecomsTech caught up with the company's Director of Marketing, Matt Keowen, to get some further insights on how EE could have used an alternate solution.
Keowen suggests that by moving to the Cloud like one of Twilio's clients, Amigo Loans, they could have presented significant cost-savings through better understanding of callers, the reduction of expensive equipment, and the ability to add caller-preferential features such as SMS.
Recently Twilio did some research on cost-savings by moving to the Cloud from legacy equipment. Keowen says: "The cost of an initial purchase is in the $4 million range for all the things which would be necessary. Those purchases also come with an annual maintenance fee, and that can be as much as 20 - 30% of the upfront hardware purchase."
Such massive reductions in ongoing costs would be better placed into more operators with more modern features which could prevent a call even being placed, you would think, and there would be a lot more happier EE customers today.
