To incensed at the length of time organisations keep us waiting before answering the phone or replying on line

[Tremblingmadness]

Having spent four hours waiting to speak to HMRC today I am tearing my hair out.

I have an urgent payment query caused by an issue in their system. I attempted to resolve it with their AI offering, but the bot couldn’t understand.

There have followed three phone calls, all cut off at about the 1 hour stage. I am currently on the fourth.

Why, why, why? Just why?

My issue won’t go away, it has to be answered, so why do they believe it will help the situation by making me waste a large part of the day listening to them telling me how important my call is, while playing me the most irritating jingle.

Last week it was my Insurance Company, two weeks ago the AA.

I just don’t get what the point is. These organisations have to respond eventually, their AI is not fit for purpose, so why not resource sufficiently to do so in a timely manner.

AIBU to want someone to answer the phone within a few rings and what is the point of keeping us all sitting in a queue and having to ring back numerous times to get a resolution.

Quite.
As pp has noted, COVID was 3 years ago, yet the whole world still seems to want to work in their pyjamas, at a time that suits them, if it suits them, and rigorously in their front room where nobody is watching them.

It is appalling that customers who rely on these services and big companies cannot actually speak to anyone. It should be mandatory that organisations do not deliberately hide their contact telephone numbers on websites and they do not automatically direct customers to their AI chat which is frustrating and useless. It is discriminatory as older people are unlikely to be able to navigate these systems and so are left facing unresolved issues like higher bills as they are unable to speak to anyone. Who has the time to hours a day to spend on hold for HMRC while the consequences for not doing this could be severe financially. If I hear 'your call is important to us' again I will scream.

This. “Have you tried our website?” No it never occurred to me, I just thought I’d bang my head against a brick wall endlessly for fun on your woefully understaffed and moronically patronising helpline. FFS. I’m not 100 years old I have a query which I need to actually speak to someone about.

A lot of customer service questions are prompted by nuance which an AI can’t deal with. That’s the whole point. I can live with the fact they want to save cost by shoving us all onto the website but please don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting I try the website.

It makes me absolutely murderous.

Perhaps HMRC should resource their call centre in line with wholly predictable peaks and troughs in demand and also not make errors that necessitate a follow-up call in the first place

This 💯

I had the most frustrating conversation n a chat with a well known sportswear company about a problem with an incorrect order before Christmas . It just kept going around in circles 'what is your order number', what can I help you with, let me check that, I can confirm the order was delivered. It could not process that I was saying the item I ordered was not what was delivered. After going around in circles I said I didn't want to speak to a bot because it was like trying to argue with a pigeon and it said 'let me check that' 'sorry we do not have a pigeon in stock'. I gave up at that point

They need an option as soon as you join the queue for yes I checked the website. Its really annoying when they keep telling you to go online.

Oh! Don’t even start me on the smart meters!!! 😡 because mine wasn’t working, I tried to put my readings into the BG app (they’d told me when I’d phoned they hadn’t received any gas readings from me ‘for months!!!’…when were they going to let me know?!) but, of course ‘with a smart meter, you don’t need to give us readings, it’s done automatically…! Round and round and round……I didn’t want the smart meter either! But in 2016, I didn’t know I could refuse it. I could take a hatchet to the damn thing!

Just a point that most call centres are so heavily monitored that they are the absolute least likely to be skiving
I can't unload the washing unless it's on my lunch, I mean it wouldn't be on in the first place because customers would hear it and complain
Aside from set breaks and lunch, I don't leave my desk. Have to click a code to go to the toilet/get a drink and that needs to be less than 10 mins a day
My screen and phone is recorded and every second I'm unavailable (going to the toilet/lunch) is also recorded
There is literally no way of leaving your desk without someone knowing

After the NHS debacle and post office/Fujitsu scandal, I a surprised anyone expects anything better from corrupt and incompetent civil servants. Private organizations are basically just taking the piss out of customers, gaslighting them. So business as usual.

I doubt you could take on and drop knowledgeable tax advisors depending on time of year. Possibly you would hit labour laws if you tried.

I've been running call centres for years. I'm never given the budget to deliver excellent service, despite what many organisations will pretend they deliver.

Right now, at least my boss is honest. He describes my objective as 'acceptable and within budget'. Answering the phone costs money. Answering it quickly requires even more.

4 hours is ridiculous. IIRC the only target HMRC look at is if the call gets answered. If people will wait, then it must be acceptable. The only kind of protest you can make with this sort of metric is a high volume of calls where you wait 10 mins and hang up. Any shorter and they will likely not count.

I always use HMRC wait times as my example when speaking to Directors. They can't use their wealth and position to dodge poor service when it comes to HMRC. They are more likely to have had multiple issues needing contact as well.

HMRC have reduced their self assessment helplines during their busiest period - it was announced in December

Also, if you go into your Government Gateway account, you can send messages, etc in there

Otherwise, get on the phone at 8am, they are much quieter

Thing is OP, and I think people have lost sight of this, the idea of democracy has been abandoned.

The Government, in all it's various facets, was supposed to be owned by, and controlled by the public, by us. The local council office or tax office was there to serve us, hence the term "civil servant". But now that idea has been abandoned, we are seen as the servants, we are viewed as nothing more than cash cows to fund Government vanity projects. Look at Wales. The councils are broke, libraries, leisure centres and playgrounds closed, yet the Government there insisted on spending 40 million bringing in a 20mph scheme which the public didn't want. They have repeatedly told the Welsh Government they don't want it, but because the people are now seen as servants to the Government, they are simply ignored.

Same with your phone call issue. The HMRC literally don't care about you. They want your money, nothing else. It's why utility companies insist on direct debits, they have control over you then, they aren't serving you, you're not a customer, you're a revenue stream for the shareholders. And treated with the contempt you deserve.

This country is seriously broken. But it has happened gradually, we were the frogs in the saucepan, we didn't notice until things stopped working altogether.

This drives me mad. I can normally find the info I need online but just occasionally you need to speak to someone, even a direct email would do and companies make it so so hard

Tesco insurance last week - their online system wasn't working so I spent ALL day trying to ring them. Every option of multiple options, ended with "you can manage this on your online account" and the line went dead...despite the fact that the call started with "we are aware of an issue with our online systems but this has been rectified now."

When I finally found a human, he had no idea that there was a recorded message or that there had been anything wrong with the online system so had to get permission from his boss not to charge me extra!

Thing is the emails then take someone off the phone or they have to have more staff just to deal with those
I do email queries but it means I can't answer the phone while I'm doing them

You could offer annual hours contracts or overtime (at enhanced rates if necessary) without infringing employment laws. You could also take on temporary staff and train them up in the most common/basic questions that come up.

Yup, we had a good laugh about it. It was only possible to connect the voucher with the original order - not supplied - because of the tracking number on the envelope.

Booksellers do sometimes send odd little extras. Usually biscuits, chocs, pens and once a packet mix pana cotta. Our Italian specialist said she loved this and assured me it wasn’t the equivalent of Angel Delight.

All govt frontline call centre services are under pressure to reduce costs, I was recently involved in making some of those decisions in a govt department. It's one of the easiest cost saving measures because they have high turnover so rather than making people redundant you just don't backfill posts. The consequential crap service is an inevitable side effect.

Blame the current administration who are cutting the funding beyond the bone - it's that simple.

I can’t believe people are blaming customers.

Yesterday I had a website account issue with British Airways. I went through the automated system explaining my issue and was then told by the system to call back another time. I then called back pretending via the prompts that I wanted to buy a new ticket and hey presto, I managed to get connected to an agent. It is all about saving money.

After terrible customer service from John Lewis recently, I have now lost all faith.

And don’t get me started on how difficult it is for some elderly people like my parents, and others who are not technologically confident.

One of the banks here (NZ) has a call back facility when they are busy. You just leave your number, keep your place in the queue and they call you back. It is so much better than just hanging on and on and on.

Last week I had to contact our state pension department who advised me that the wait time was approximately 73 minutes. Every so often I was advised that instead of waiting I could go to their website. Only problem was that I had already been on the website and to solve my issue it said - 'just call us' - if only it was that simple!

The problem is that tax problems are really complex. The level of knowledge that the person you want to speak to has to have, is entirely different from the majority of call centre staff, who are just dealing with breakdown cover renewals or your insurance quote.

HMRC can't just go to an agency to top up their staff at busy times of year.

It needs more money to employ people and for people to genuinely search for an answer before picking up the phone then the more complex queries could be dealt with efficiently. I can promise you for all the complex queries that genuinely need a person on the end of the phone, there are 50 which could have been dealt with if the person had just searched the website

I've seen other people say that on here, but how? You (usually) have to search the website to find the telephone number, and it's often really difficult to find it and you have to go via the AI "triage" anyway, so how are people getting through with "what time do you open until" type queries?

Email was perfected in the 1970s.

#Justsayin'

Agree with this:
I will hold my hands up and say I've never worked in a government service call centre, so conditions might be different, but I have worked in a few and they are hard to skive in - your every move is examined, and your calls get listened to regularly for quality control.

Bit annoying to see people on this thread sneering at 'family friendly' working practices... not every person who needs family friendly working hours and conditions is in a job where you don't interact with anyone so can do your hours whenever/wherever you want. Call centres are crammed full of women with caring responsibilities, as often that's all they are qualified to do, or they are the only places offering hours that work around the kids, or a partners shift pattern. But this was the case BEFORE Covid for many years, and isn't the cause of you not getting through: that's the fact that the Tory party have decimated this country, and we are as a planet run on capitalism and greed by those at the top, so every call centre is pressured to have less people working there, more people using the AI (which wasn't invented last week, we had a basic AI chat bot for the call centre I worked in 12 years ago)
I'm not saying you WONT get a shit person on the other end of the phone, because there's shit people in every walk of life, but you get shouted at all day long for minimum wage in call centres, so having been there, on the verge of tears trying to keep up with the fact the rules and processes have changed internally again, while someone gets very aggro at you for something that is out of your hands to fix...