Do not hang up, your call is very important to us
GETTING to the airport only to find that your flight is cancelled is everyone’s worst nightmare. But when we become really hopping mad is trying to get through to the airline’s call centre for a refund.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that a new league table of the longest call centre queues names budget airline EasyJet as one of its worst offenders – second only to InHealth Netcare, the service used by NHS healthcare professionals and their patients to access test results.
Parcel delivery service Yodel, which took over DHL’s domestic business, TV provider Freesat from Sky and mobile phone operator T-Mobile are also named and shamed in the top 10 list of longest waits.
The survey comes courtesy of tech entrepreneur Matt King, who set up WeQ 4U, an app that waits in the queue for you and cuts out the extra charges.
The league is compiled from more than 10,000 calls made to more than 3,000 different UK call centres between February and April this year.
The prize for the UK’s “rudest” call centre goes to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which was also responsible for 23 per cent of the worst waits.
Ironically, the Department of Work & Pensions’s Job Centre took second place followed by British Airways.
In a rant of his own King has declared today National Queue Awareness Day “because it’s the date in the new tax year when people’s lives are finally taken off hold and they can get on with contributing to UK plc instead.”
Britons spend on average 45 hours a year waiting on the phone.
That means that contacting all of the top 10 worst wait centres from a mobile phone would cost a total of around £94 – and that’s before you’ve even spoken to a customer adviser.
“That’s five whole days of productivity which will be wiped off of the new tax working year for every single person. Two per cent of the UK economy wasted to be precise,” Kind adds.
Now, as much as The Capitalist enjoys a good moan, that’s quite enough time wasted ranting for one day.