Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

There is a simple solution (and i have suggested this before) to cut down waiting times which would ease the congestion and would benefit the customer.

As soon as you join the queue your given a number and an estimated time when your call will be answered, as an option to select a call back (your phone rings your still in the queue) when your number gets to a lower number in the queue (which means the customer is not holding the phone getting ear ache for 10-20mins) the added bonus to this solution is that if a customer happens to be number 60 when he/she joins the queue they would obvously choose to call back later.

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

With respect, I don't think you're thinking outside the box (removes David Brent hat).

If you can back up the fact that a freephone line will generate more calls, then please give examples. Personally I do not believe it will. Why? Becuase I don't want to talk to the people in tech support, unless I have a problem. It's not like I'm going to call you up and talk about the weather is it?

Look at the customers' point of view. Why should I have to spend an hour on hold, paying for the call, to be told that the fault is at your end after all? A lesser person than I might think of that as extortion or fraud!

My way offers customers with problems with their settings and so on, the opportunity of quality paid for service on an incedent basis.

My way offers customers who have connection problems less of an INSULT when phoning up to be told your system is falling apart again. The freephone aspect is a customer retention tool, not something designed to increase volume of calls.

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

Well, I'd have to agree that a freephone number would generate more calls. If I knew the tech support line was free I'd ring it for a small fault, whereas I'd possibly just leave it and wait till the morning to see if it had magically fixed itself (9 / 10 it does) before ringing the pay for number.

However, I do believe that the call should be free... but from econimical PoV I can see why it's not.

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

Ohh im sorry didnt realise you took technical calls for technical support.

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

When was Cable Modem Technical Support a freefone number?
You clearly have experience of the days when calling TS was free ;)

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

Well thanks for your constructive response. Personally I am not sure that the people in tech support handle that many either, hence the ridiculous wait that so many of the people who pay your wages have endure every time your hugely ineffective system blows up again. :nono:

At least I am trying to come up with better solutions...what are you doing in your call centre? Reading the Sport?

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

I see your point, and you may be correct. However from a customer's point of view it's a terrible enditement that customers think this way for a service costing £300 a year.

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

Well untill you sit here on the end of the phones, what you know = Nothing.
Keep Trying

Ohhh an Btw our systems arent handled by NTL (Duhh)

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

I wasn't disagreeing with the fact that I think it should be a freefone number. Just unfortunately the world isn't perfect :/

Most of the tech support lines I have to deal through work are (as I look along the list) 0870 or 0845. 0870 really p*ss me off! Thankfully the company pays for the phone calls and not me ;)

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

I'm sure I've spent 4 hours trying to get through. :grind: Didn't help.
An hour's wait certainly used to be "typical", half an hour was a really good day. Thankfully I've had little cause to ring tech support recently.

I object to having to pay for a nice long phonecall to try and argue with someone at NTL that they seem to have flipped that magic switch that sets my account to "not working". Whilst being told several dozen times to toggle random dialup settings reboot my machine etc.

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

Looking back on my calls to TS etc, I can't help but notice how many times the call was fixed by 'deleting your account' and 'setting it up again'!!!!!!!!!!!! sounds like an ntl fault to me, am I wrong???

When I think of how long I waited on hold, paying for the call only to be told that basically it's ntl's fault that my access is down I feel like a total plonker!

what a scam, lets charge 'em £400 per year for a service hten jiggle the plugs and settings to make them phone us on our own phone network to report the problem...oo...ooooo... I know, lets keep them on hold for fifty mins before answering just to run the bill up before we plug them back in!

can't believe that I put up with it! my company offewrs a 4000 bit encryption service for email, with each fault customers get a service credit equal to a quarter of a years subscription, if ntl had this system we would all be millionairs!!!!!!!!

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

sorry for spe3lling,,,,, terribly , terribly drunk at the time +)

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

See now this is how calls would go up.
Mr.Jones here cant connect to the internet. He may currently think 'hmm its probably a local outage, il give it a couple of hours then ring'
However Mr.Jones knows he doesnt have to pay for this call, so its probably worth ringing up the free technical support number.
/40 minutes on hold 'Ohhh it was a local outage, thats ok I dont pay for this anyway'

Mr.Jones has just caused Mrs.Maple who cant receive her emails an extra wait.

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

Sounds pretty much like my story on dialup, they claimed that since I had gone through the registration process I now had to ring the premium rate line. They also cut off my previous 1p a minute (which was one of the main reasons I first went with NTL) so I had to use other ISPs at the higher rate. This went on for months with me generally being told to ring the premium rate line or fobbed off and told my dialup settings/password/colour of socks where wrong. When you tell them "you are the twelveth person who has told me to tick or untick that checkbox today" they don't believe you, just do the same steps over and over as though it were part of some magical ceremony to make things work.

After my eventually getting in touch with oftel when it became clear NTL had no intention of actually connecting me, NTL suddenly found my account was disabled at their end - flip the switch oh look it works. Cue sudden concerned phone calls and letters from NTL.

I wonder how much money NTL made on my phone calls to them and other ISPs during those months ?

Re: Is a half hour wait acceptable?
 

I certainly wouldn't waste 40 minutes of my life being listening to NTL hold music if I thought there was any way of avoiding it,free or not.

I imagine that there's a large number of really pointless calls, in the same way there's are pointless 999 calls.... :idea: hey I've had a great idea.... lets charge people £1 a minute for ringing 999 that'll put the spoof callers off.