Why I despise Orange
BlogSeven years I’ve been an Orange customer. Seven years. Back in the good days if you had a customer service question you rang up any time of day, spoke to someone for whom English was a first language, and they sorted your problem within a couple of minutes.
Three times I’ve called Orange today for help. True, someone eventually answered, but after an average of eight minutes of waiting listening to the new “Orange lady” — whose voice makes me irate — tell me how important my call is, and how they’re experiencing a high number of calls.
No, you just don’t employ enough people to deal with your dreadful service, and the ones you do employ are clinically inept at helping customers.
I will be leaving Orange, and I will be doing everything in my power as a human being and a journalist to advise others keep clear. There’s too much competition in the mobile sector for people to have to put up with such incapable customer service.
Here are three easy steps for running a decent customer service agency, written by someone who constantly has to deal with an abysmal one:
1) If you’re permanently telling people you’re dealing with too many calls, hire more people
2) To make resolution faster for your British customers, employ British people to speak to them
3) Instead of just telling me my call is important to you, prove it — at least have a backup agency on standby.
In the UK alone you pull almost £5 billion in revenue. Instead of giving people free cinema tickets, employ capable staff, and don’t wind long-term customers up while they’re on hold for a full eight minutes a time by hiring a nasal, cold female voice to tell me call is important when above all else it is not.
And I’m not alone in this thinking. You’ll be losing this customer after close to a decade, perhaps take this previously happy customer’s advice and don’t lose thousands more — T-Mobile is looking ever so tempting, not to mention O2. God I wish I was on O2.