The TV Licensing operations contractor, Capita Business Services Ltd, terminated almost 150,000 customer phone calls in a year without even bothering to answer them.
Just as you'd expect, that woeful performance is well below the expectations of Capita's service level agreement with the BBC.
TV Licensing has been widely ridiculed for the atrocious way it handles incoming calls. Anyone with the misfortune of having to speak to TV Licensing on the telephone - not that we recommend it - will first have to battle their way through a baffling array of up to 71 different menu options. Fortunately we know a shortcut, which you can read about in our earlier post on the subject.
Between 1st February 2014 and 31st March 2015 TV Licensing recorded the "forced abandonment" of 146,882 incoming calls before the operator had even answered. This equates to around 480 telephone calls being ignored every day that the call centre is open - that's 480 calls that the customers are still paying for.
Forced abandonment occurs at times of high demand, when the TV Licensing call centre is overwhelmed by incoming calls and pulls the plug to free up capacity.
This data was published on page 6 (of 18) of the TV Licensing Front Office Performance Pack for March 2015, which was recently released by the BBC in response to a Freedom of Information request. You can view that document here.
The same document reveals that a further 94,041 telephone calls were abandoned by customers who got fed up of waiting for an operator to answer. These customers abandoned their call after wasting, on average, 2 minutes and 30 seconds of their time.
In total 241,973 calls were abandoned, representing around 4 percent of incoming calls.
Anyone requiring information about TV Licensing is advised to visit the official TV Licensing website or, better still, try using the search bar above to see if we've already covered the topic.
The TV Licensing Blog is grateful to Nathan Gregory for his assistance in researching this article.
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