I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide for maximum waiting times for customers who are contacting providers of utilities and certain other services by telephone; to require such companies to ensure that customers can speak to a person within that maximum waiting time; to restrict the use of automated menus on telephone services offered by such companies; to provide for financial penalties for companies that fail to meet these standards; and for connected purposes.
I would first like to say how pleased I am to have worked with the Daily Mail and Money Mail, specifically Helena Kelly and Tilly Armstrong, to support the Money Mail “Pick Up or Pay Up” campaign.
How often do we hear the dreaded phrase, “Sorry, we’re rather busy right now, but your call is important to us. Please hold the line”? How often do we have to wait 15, 20, 30 or 40-plus minutes on the phone to get through, after spending the first five minutes being asked to press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6? How often do we wait all that time to get through and then get cut off, so that we have to start the whole horrific process all over again?
Utility companies, big multinationals with chief executives earning huge salaries, have created a Kafkaesque torture chamber of customer service. That is now happening every day across the United Kingdom, and has been for some time now, as families all over Britain try to contact their utility and service providers. Customer service standards plummeted during the pandemic, as companies grappled with the new work guidelines, but they still have not recovered and, worse still, some companies use that as an excuse, despite most workplaces having returned to normal.
According to Citizens Advice, customer service ratings for energy firms, for example, are the worst they have been since 2017, with the highest-performing suppliers scoring less than 60% for customer satisfaction. Those ratings, as the suppliers admit, are due to these egregiously long waiting times, yet seemingly no action has been taken to rectify that terrible quality of service for essential needs. In fact, consumer-facing service providers seem to be finding any way to avoid blame or accountability, to the point that NOW TV, talking to a member of my office, claimed that the death of Her late Majesty the Queen was the reason for any potential waiting times. As the saying goes, you couldn’t make it up.
Often, once we have surpassed such messages and clicked all the right buttons, we are then told by an automated voice that in fact the best route is via an online portal or text chat, despite having already been on hold for 20 minutes—and that is if we are even lucky enough to find the necessary contact details. Money Mail and the Daily Mail discovered that telecoms giants and energy suppliers are burying their telephone numbers on obscure pages of their websites to deter customers from calling for help.