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Waiting endlessly, being put through again and again, waiting again and telling your story again. Or a chat box that doesn’t understand the simplest questions. Many consumers are discouraged by the customer service of companies and organizations. So it’s high time for Kassa’s Customer Service Survey.
At the end of May, early June, Kassa will conduct an online poll with 2500 participants, 1860 of whom will complete the entire survey. Three-quarters of them had a bad experience with customer service last year. The participants give customer service in our country an average of a meager 5.1. There are many complaints, especially about long waiting times at telephone customer service.
After that general assessment, we zoom in on energy companies, telecom providers and health insurers. Kassa gets a lot of questions about this. They are essential services in private hands. Services we can’t do without. Good customer service is crucial for these companies. We ask questions about these three sectors. Only the respondents who indicate that they have an experience with customer service can give their opinion. When ranking, we exclude companies with fewer than 25 experiences.
Checkout customer service inquiry
The Dutch are green and yellow annoyed with the customer service of companies and (government) organizations in the Netherlands. The average report mark is a 5.1. Three-quarters of them (74%) have had a bad customer service experience in the past year. By far the biggest frustration concerns the long waiting time at the telephone customer service.
More than half of customers of energy companies (57%) and telecom providers (57%) cite the long waiting time as the main complaint. In addition, people are annoyed that telephone numbers are often difficult or impossible to find. Incompetence of employees and chatbots (chatbots) that do not understand questions and do not answer are also major sources of frustration.
Essential sectors
We zoomed in on three essential sectors where good customer service is of great importance: energy companies, telecom providers and health insurers. In the overviews we only include companies of which at least 25 respondents have shared an experience. At both energy (31%) and telecom companies (33%), a third of their own customers rate their provider as unsatisfactory for the service offered. The health insurers are doing a lot better with ‘only’ 17% fail marks.
Who scores the best and where is the customer service the least? The average marks give a slightly more positive picture, because a striking number of customers give their own provider of health insurance, energy and telecom an 8 out of 10.
Telecom
At Telecom, customer service receives an average meager pass (6.3). By far the best is here: Xs4All (7.9) with almost an 8, is the worst rated of the larger providers Delta immediately 5.1.
80% of customers in this sector report an experience with their provider’s customer service. No less than 42% of these indicate that they have complaints. In addition to long waiting times (57%), these are mainly: having to explain the problem over and over again (50%), incompetence on the part of the employee (41%) and the chatbot that does not understand the question (21.1%).
Energy
Energy does not fare much better on average 6.4. Spacious at the top UnitedConsumers met 8.3. Stand at the bottom Oxxio with less than 5 (4.9).39% of the respondents with an experience indicate that they have complaints about their own provider: long waiting times (57%) are: the chatbot that does not understand questions (35%), having to explain again and again (33%), no telephone number available (23%) or it is difficult or impossible to find the telephone number (26%).
Health insurers
The health insurers score an average of 7 (7.2 ) for customer service. Here’s another winner who towers above: DSWmet 8.4 . The worst performer in this poll is ASRmet 6.1 .
Only a quarter (26%) of the respondents with a customer service experience at their own health insurer have complaints: long waiting times (50%), explaining over and over again (35%), incompetence of an employee (27%) and a chatbot that cannot answer the question. understands is 20% are mentioned the most.
A majority of all respondents (56%) approve or understand the frequent surveys after customer contact and always or usually participate. 44% have less understanding or find it annoying and hardly or never participate.
Responses from the companies
We present the findings to a number of companies that have received many complaints. All companies want to emphasize how important customer service is to them and how much they are valued by their own customers as well. The survey numbers tell a different story. No company denies that problems do arise, but they are often temporary in nature and during peak periods and everything is done to put an end to them as quickly as possible.
Reaction Vattenfall
Leader in long waiting times in the energy sector waterfall writes in an extensive response: “After a quiet period in the spring, all the news about new favorable fixed price contracts was reason for many people to contact us. Even our call center, where we had deployed 200 extra employees, could not withstand that. Despite the information on our website, including the ‘fixed variable check’, we saw that people opted en masse for telephone contact. We think it’s important to really take the time in every conversation to answer people’s questions after the uncertain time that seems to be behind us. The people we spoke to were very satisfied with the time we took to help them make a good choice. At the same time, waiting times are increasing, which is very annoying for the customers who had to wait longer than we would like.
Since the energy crisis, we have seen that attention to energy is very high. Due to rising and falling energy prices, the price cap and the range of fixed price contracts, a lot has changed for our customers. In some cases, this leads to high peaks in customer service, such as in June. That is why we will be recruiting staff again in the coming period to deal with any peaks in the number of telephone calls in the future. Accessibility will be back to normal in the coming weeks, if there is a waiting time between 0 and a maximum of 5 minutes. At the same time, we also call on customers to use Whatsapp. We see that the use of Whatsapp is rising sharply and customer satisfaction is high.”
Reaction Budget energy
BudgetEnergy acknowledges that during the energy crisis last year accessibility ‘a challenge’ used to be. But over the whole of 2023, the average waiting time is 1 minute and 30 seconds, according to our own figures. And the telephone number would be easy to find on the website, says a spokesman, although the Budget Energy survey of the energy companies scores the worst on that point. Why a test subject with a question about the telephone number is thrown out of the chat is a mystery and customer-unfriendly. Possibly a technical problem, it should not be possible, the company says.
Response T-Mobile
Telecom leader in long waiting times T-Mobile mentions the well-known argument of staff shortages. “We have recently received more questions from customers than expected. Unfortunately, the waiting time may have increased as a result. Our customer service had to be scaled up quickly in a short period of time, which was a challenge in a tight labor market. Our T-Mobile home customer service team has been back at full strength for some time now and all further plans for further growth are on track to offer customers the service they have come to expect from us.”
Response Ziggo
Industry colleague Ziggostates that, according to its own measurements, the ambition of an average waiting time of 1 minute will be achieved this year. That is far from our experience with the sample we do – after waiting 9 minutes the connection is broken – although that is of course a snapshot. But more importantly, in the survey Ziggo scores worst on this point after T-Mobile in the Telecom sector.
Do you want to read the full response from the Consumers’ Association? Click the button below!
2023-08-05 17:09:29
#Customer #service #Netherlands #par #Checkout #BNNVARA
