I was scanning the charges on one of my mobile phones phones and found the following:
Type of
usageUsage Description You used Unit of
measureTotal
cost ($)Text Msg US Text Messages – sent 1 Msgs 0.25 Text Msg US txt msgs – sent 1 Msgs 0.60
It was not intuitively clear to me why one message was a quarter and another was 60 cents. And, as it turns out, it took an agent at the call centre almost 10 minutes to tell me that I had one message from Canada to the US and the other was a text message sent from the US to a US phone.
I suggested that the bill description could use some improvement and there was no way that the agent could take that input. He tried to tell me that the two different types of charges show up differently – it is obvious, isn’t it?
I thought that if it was so obvious, I wouldn’t have called, and the agent wouldn’t have needed 10 minutes to research why the two lines had different charges.
The real point of this exercise is to demonstrate the need to have a feedback loop from the call centre to examine what generates calls. What would it take to eliminate calls like this in the future? What if one line had read “Txt Msg – Canada to US” and the other said “Txt Msg – US originated”?
Simple issues like this don’t arise if telecom executives look at their own bills and read them the same way that their customers do.
At last week’s launch of the brand for Public Mobile, Alek Krstajic spoke of the cost savings associated with simple flat rate plans. When the bill is always $40, there are no calls with billing questions.