Telecom giant British Telecom has announced plans to shut down its call centres in India to bring them back to Britain following complaints of poor customer service.
The U.K.’s flagship telecom giant, which has used call centres in Delhi and Bengaluru, has said that more than 80 per cent of calls will be answered in the U.K. by the end of 2016, and that it will go further in years to come.
“Our customers have told us that they would prefer to speak to a contact centre in the U.K. when they call us,” explained John Petter, Chief Executive of BT Consumer.
“When we launched BT Mobile earlier this year we located customer service in the U.K. and our customers have valued that. We think doing this for our other products is one way in which we can boost the service that we offer customers. Our offshore partners have provided a good level of service, however we believe that now is the right time to commit more investment to the U.K. and that this is something customers will appreciate,” he said.
Since 2003, the firm, which has more than 10 million customers in the U.K., has used call centres in Bangalore and Delhi to supplement its U.K. operations, according to the ‘Guardian’ Currently half of BT’s customer calls are dealt with at centres in the U.K.
The firm will continue to outsource back-office work and functions that do not involve frontline work of taking customers’ calls offshore and those jobs will most likely stay in India.
BT said it had already created more than 1,000 new U.K. jobs to meet this commitment, and plans to create “hundreds of other customer call centre positions in the U.K. over the next year.”
The company has 20 contact centres in the U.K. from Wales and Cornwall to the Midlands and Scotland.
Telecom customers have long complained of poor customer service with staff unable to sort out basic problems. BT has said it had also invested in new systems to assist its advisers and improve customer services.
Last week, the consumer group Which? reported that not being able to ring a call centre based in the U.K. was the nation’s biggest customer service bugbear.
Nearly half of those surveyed by the organisation said they were irritated by call centres not being based in the U.K..
