LONDON: “We have removed our telephone number,” said a note on the website of a photography business I needed to contact in a hurry last week.or by filling in the form below,” it added.
The thing is, the numberless business was at least being open about its intentions. A growing number of organisations have quietly dispensed with website phone numbers, or made them so hard to find that they may as well not exist.This was happening long before the pandemic spurred a wave of digital commerce. Reaching a person at places like Facebook has been so famously difficult that even police officers have complained.
Still, a backlash is taking shape. Spain this year moved to require companies to answer customer calls within three minutes, with a flesh-and-blood employee, and similar efforts are afoot in the United Kingdom. The question is, why don’t more companies seize on the deepening fury about clueless customer service and make a competitive virtue of offering better support?
“We are about 30 per cent more efficient and effective,” a spokesperson told me last week, adding it was a mistake to think that onlyCommentary: Artificial intelligence and automation would actually benefit Singapore “On many websites the contact information is buried at least five links deep, because the company doesn’t really want to hear from you. And when you find it, it’s a form or an email address,” he once wrote in Harvard Business Review.