The best of reader comments: The best and worst call centre experiences

Telephone banking pioneer First Direct can do no wrong; major telcos and cable companies can do no right. That's a gross generalisation but one that sums up the extremes of the silicon.com reader feedback we've received about call centre experiences this week.

It seems we've all had good and bad call centre contact over the years - and arguably any large company will throw up a fair number of memorable mishaps and technical hitches. Add to that the fact that most of us tend to remember the bad times and forget the good, then the amount of complaints we were sent is hardly surprising.

However, one company was consistently praised. On First Direct's knack of getting CRM spot on, Steve Edwards wrote: "The service is prompt (adequately staffed), the staff are knowledgeable and they seem to be able to strike the balance about dealing with routine enquiries at first attempt but transferring to more specialist knowledge when appropriate. Last week I was able to arrange a car loan and also wanted to pay some euros into a foreign account. Confirmed offer on car loan offer online in less than 90 seconds, transferred to foreign exchange agent who sorted euro payment out and suggested a means to reduce costs on future transactions."

Meanwhile, Mike Aitken had something worrying to say about a well-known cable TV and broadband provider: "Several times I've attempted to call NTL, go through the prolonged 'Press 1 for X, 2 for Y etc', get to the end of the process after several minutes to be offered 'Sorry, all our customer service operators are busy, please call back later' - and then the line is cut."

But we heard much worse. Take Paul Blacker, who went through lengthy negotiations with Dell customer services after a technical fault with a PC. Sure, it took time, a wiped C drive and plenty of calls, but what stands out are the lessons he learnt.

He told us: "First, Microsoft caused the fault in the first place - I never spoke to them but they managed to waste the best part of a day of my life. Second, Dell took in excess of 1.5 hours of my time to speak to me for a sum total of 5-8 minutes and charged me £20 for the privilege. Dell fundamentally made me a dissatisfied customer but probably made money." Ouch.

Other companies to be praised include Royal Bank of Scotland, for its MasterCard service, BT, for helping out when Telewest failed to deliver, and HP, though only creeping in ironically after accidentally delivering one, two or even three extra printers to certain customers because - according to an agent - of a CRM software fault.

"If HP, one of the largest IT companies cannot get it right, what help for the rest of us?" wrote reader Sean McPoland.

But other accounts went from the incredible to the LOL funny. Les Bamber had several encounters with a BT Openworld support desk for his broadband service. When asking about its dealings with a faults department he was told by an agent: "I can't phone them because we're not allowed to. What else do you expect me to do?"

Later he was told this nugget, which we don't advise anyone to take on board: "Leave your computer running so we can monitor and leave your firewall turned off. You only really need a firewall if you work for MI5." He said he went on to leave the ISP after that.

And spare a final thought for Greg Rainbird, a happy owner of a Sony Clie PDA. We're not sure if this counts as a call centre moment or a plain old telephony blunder but after dealing with a Sony Center employee about a digital camera peripheral he received a call-back with news about pricing. This is how he describes what happened next: "I waited to delete the message slightly longer than normal and realised that the very 'nice' gentleman had forgotten to hang up the phone. He did not realise this and proceeded to shout: "So shove that price up your arse!" I was gob-smacked. I hasten to add that I did not purchase the camera but still own my Sony Clie which I would ideally like to upgrade. :-)"

If you have a call centre experience worth telling us about email your comments to editorial@silicon.com.