How May I Help You?

Picking up the telephone and dialing one of Canada's top companies can sometimes lead to a frustrating experience.

"I logged about nine hours over four days and [my issue] was eventually corrected on the last day with a two-hour phone call to the fifth agent who was determined to help me," said one CBCNews.ca reader, who wrote in to discuss the state of customer service in Canada.

It seems so many Canadians have had the same experience on the phone.

"We get lots of complaints," said Bruce Cran, the president of the Consumers' Association of Canada. "People dislike the push-button system that means when you get on, you're on for 10 minutes, then you're back where you start from."

At the centre of what some people term "call centre hell" is IVR — the interactive voice response system. Bell calls its system Emily — the automated voice that answers the vast majority of toll-free numbers in Canada and is supposed to direct callers to the department best suited to deal with their problems.

CBC News decided to look into the level of customer service provided by 40 of Canada's top companies. "How May I Help You?" is our evaluation of firms' telephone service systems. The number of call transfers is measured, and the demeanour of the operators is assessed.

Surprising results

Sears Canada's HomeCentral ranked as the country's best provider of telephone-based customer service. It was easy for our call researchers to quickly speak to a human being. And once we got through, the operators were pleasant and efficient while addressing the question posed by our examination.

"It's important for the customer not to be given the run-around," says Ajit Khanna, a senior vice-president with Sears Canada. "If they phone one number, they don't have to speak to two or three or four operators before their call is handled."

The CBC News "How May I Help You?" survey showed that, overall, Canadian companies offer a good level of customer service when the customer is inquiring about general information. For example, when we called the big banks, we asked the operator how a credit-card balance transfer works. The banks, for the most part, offered the information quickly and professionally.

Our survey results show 12 companies scoring 80 per cent or higher. These companies were quick to answer their calls, and we found their interactive voice response systems easy to navigate. The results may go against the conventional thinking that a telephone-based customer service experience is usually a bad experience.

Ian Jacobs, a call-centre expert with U.S.-based Frost & Sullivan, says he's noticing that many companies are putting more money and people into their telephone customer service. "Companies swung too far toward focusing on efficiency in customer interactions. The pendulum is now swinging toward what I would see as effectiveness."

But not for all companies.

In Canada, telecommunications service providers continue to cause consumer headaches. CBC News asked for customer service stories from Canadians earlier this year, and the vast majority of negative experiences centred on the telcos.

"Recently I switched from horrible Telus to Rogers Home Phone. My request wasn't really all that complicated, but to date I've made over 20 phone calls [to Rogers], spent more than nine hours on the phone, been promised solutions by nine reps and two managers. I've been waiting for my service to be fixed for over a month," Cam of Calgary wrote.

According to consumer feedback, some Canadian companies struggle to offer good customer service when dealing with what are sometimes complicated problems. CBCNews.ca readers complained that often their calls were misdirected to the wrong departments, or often there was no record of a previous call, forcing the customer to rehash the problem over and over.

How the survey was conducted

"How May I Help You?" was conducted over several weeks, with CBC researchers making three calls to each of the 40 companies surveyed — one call at night, one during the day and the last on a weekend. You can see how each company fared by clicking on the company's name on our results page.

Working with the CBC Research Department, we came up with a number of customer service standards. To come to these standards, we looked at both call-centre industry standards and consumer standards for good customer service.

Got your own story about customer service, from either side of the phone line — good or bad? We want to know about it as well as your thoughts on our survey results.

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