BA TO BEGIN OUTSOURCING UK CALL CENTRES

Upon calling customer support in the UK recently, I received the playback,“We are receiving an extremely high number of calls. Currently customers are waiting in excess of 15 minutes for their call to be answered” (something that has been happening more and more recently) but I was surprised to have my call answered just two minutes later by an agent from the BA office in Jackson, Florida. He told me that it was part of a new scheme being trialled whereby its office was taking UK calls at times of high call demand. However that office is closing on December 20, when a call centre in India will share the call load with BA’s existing UK call centres. Anyone know anything more? REPLIES Every time I call BA, I too always seem to get the, “We are receiving an extremely high number of calls” spiel. Either I’m just unlucky, or they have one or two agents on and can’t cope with more than three people calling in at the same time. If they do outsource to another country, it will be a shame. Many businesses that have offshored their call centres have found that it’s better to bring them back home. To be fair to BA, that’s the case with most call centres – a 15-minute wait is par for the course. This is a mixed blessing. Its UK call centres have to be one of the worst things about BA. Staff are often rude and unhelpful, and heaven forbid you call between 1950 and 1955 when they close at 2000. If this is the same team that deals with the emails, then it’s out of the frying pan into the fire because not one of the three replies that I’ve ever received from them adequately answered my original question.