I came across this article the other day about what's going on with the telecom industry in Australia. It's a pretty interesting idea that's worth keeping an eye on in hopes that we could one day adopt a similar plan here in the US. The Australian government has launched the Telecommunications Customer Service Guarantee - Retail Performance Benchmarks which would fine telecom companies up to $2 million for not providing solid customer service. The idea behind the plan is to "to protect consumers against poor customer service by setting timeframes to be met by service providers for the connection, fault repair, and keeping of appointments in relation to standard telephone services,” according to the senator who launched the plan. The larger companies would be forced to comply with the benchmarks 90% of the time, or else they could face fines from the government. While $2 million might not seem like a lot of money to some larger companies, it should be large enough to get their attention and force them focus on providing solid customer service. Smaller telecom companies would be exempt from the performance benchmarks.
I think we can all agree that at one time or another, we've been told by the phone company that the field agent would show up on a certain day, somewhere between 8am and 2pm. We've all sat there in limbo, waiting for the person to show up, only to have them call you after the allotted time to tell you they aren't going to make the appointment. Or even worse, sometimes they don't call you at all, causing you to waste an entire day only to have the issue you called about, remain an issue that needs fixing. Well how great would it be to not only know that this wouldn't happen going forward, but that if a company pulls a stunt like this again, they'd be forced to pay a large sum of money? I don't think there are too many of you that would vote against this if given the chance. It will be interesting to follow the developments in Australia to see how successful this new program is. If all goes well, I can't imagine it would take too much to get the attention of someone in the US government to potentially adopt a similar plan, thus giving us all better service going forward.
For more on this new program,
click here.
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Posted by GetHuman on Thu, 11 Aug 2011 1:52pm