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Re: BBA Test Case Q & A s
Left hanging on the line as call centres prioritise the wealthy
This is an extended version of an article by Andrew Bibby which first appeared in the Mail on Sunday, March 2006
Furious about being kept waiting in a call centre queue? You might be even angrier to discover that while you wait other customers are being answered first – because they are wealthier than you. This is already a common practice in the United States, and it's now beginning to be introduced in Britain too. “An inbound call can be sorted into a priority queue that gives priority to those callers who are most likely to spend higher amounts of money,” says Professor Michael Blakemore of Durham University, who had investigated the impact of new technology on the way that we live and work today. “It is used widely in the call centre and marketing industry. To put it at its most brutal, it's actually good business sense – you want to hit your most profitable customers first.”
Call prioritisation can be achieved in several ways. The simplest way is to use several telephone numbers, giving your best, or your richest, customers a special number which only they know to use. But call prioritisation is also possible because of the way call centres work. Incoming calls are dealt with initially by sophisticated technology called automated call distribution, which decides how calls will be routed through to available staff. If you've phoned in on your normal phone line, the software can work out who you are by identifying this phone number from the customer database, a process known as calling line identification, CLI.
Left hanging on the line as call centres prioritise the wealthy
This is an extended version of an article by Andrew Bibby which first appeared in the Mail on Sunday, March 2006
Furious about being kept waiting in a call centre queue? You might be even angrier to discover that while you wait other customers are being answered first – because they are wealthier than you. This is already a common practice in the United States, and it's now beginning to be introduced in Britain too. “An inbound call can be sorted into a priority queue that gives priority to those callers who are most likely to spend higher amounts of money,” says Professor Michael Blakemore of Durham University, who had investigated the impact of new technology on the way that we live and work today. “It is used widely in the call centre and marketing industry. To put it at its most brutal, it's actually good business sense – you want to hit your most profitable customers first.”
Call prioritisation can be achieved in several ways. The simplest way is to use several telephone numbers, giving your best, or your richest, customers a special number which only they know to use. But call prioritisation is also possible because of the way call centres work. Incoming calls are dealt with initially by sophisticated technology called automated call distribution, which decides how calls will be routed through to available staff. If you've phoned in on your normal phone line, the software can work out who you are by identifying this phone number from the customer database, a process known as calling line identification, CLI.
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