In the last couple of years, the telcos have actively tried to become more customer-centric by connecting with their subscribers and potential customers in many ways. This has included mass consumers connects, celebrating customer day, hosting customer expo’s and some have even made it mandatory for all employees to serve a day or two every year at various sales and service centers to ensure all employees understand the customer better.
Despite all these efforts, the key criteria to judge the customer-centricity of each player is by evaluating the effectiveness of their customer service departments. Here is a quick review of the effectiveness of telecommunication industry’s online helplines.
Criteria: The service is user friendly, timely and accurate | 4- Excellent , 3- Good, 2- Average, 1- Poor, 0 does not exist
Ease to Enter Chat
Most of the telco sector has done a fairly good job at ensuring that customer service can be availed at any page on the website via a pop up button. A simple process follows, where you need to provide some basic information to enter the live chat domain.
Time Taken to Respond
Mobilink and Telenor provide immediate help no matter what time of the day it is, with the customer representative responding immediately. Unfortunately Ufone and Zong don’t match expectations in any manner. Ufone lets its customers know how long the wait will be before a representative becomes available.The longest queue time observed thus far has been 241 minutes. That is 4 hours of wait before a simple question can get answered via online help.
Zong takes a long time to connect customers/information seekers to the channel and once it does, you may have to wait for many hours before a representative becomes available. Zong does provide the option to leave a message that they will reply to later, however, no such reply was received.
Accuracy of Response
For a large part representatives copy-paste the information already available on the internet or simply tell you the information is available on: www.<enter name of the company>.com. If you coax them further they might give you the exact page link.
Confusions arise when you ask them questions about new services and offers. Usually the representatives have limited information and if the answer is not available within those limits they will not be able to offer help.
The worst service encounter that occurred was when the customer representative denied the existence of the service under question. He/she had to be convinced by pasting a link of the service from the company’s website.
Time Taken to End Chat
Mobilink representatives are polite and will confirm that your query has been resolved before closing call and routing users to the feedback form. With Telenor Pakistan it largely depends on the representatives mood and capability. Many times the chat window closes to the feedback form without a confirmation on query resolution.
Feedback Form
Mobilink and Telenor both have fairly similar and simple feedback forms. Ufone star system is un-editable, stars once given cannot be erased.
Timing of Service
While Mobilink , Telenor and Zong both retain a 24 hour service , Ufone operates from 10am to 10pm only.
All in all, Mobilink wins the vote as being the most user friendly online customer helpline, followed closely by Telenor. Zong and Ufone both have a long way to go before they can even begin to compete in this arena since most of the time you will not make it to the query resolution part. Warid has no online customer support available currently.
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