by Tom Bradley

How would you assess the following business practice?

I’m picking up my phone to make an order. I know what I want to buy and have credit card in hand.

I dial the 1-800 number. It takes me about a minute to wind my way through the standard questions. I press #1 for English. Then #2. #1 a few more times and finally I’m where I’m supposed to be.

And then it happens. I hear a friendly voice tell me that, “due to higher than normal call volumes, your wait will be approximately 40 minutes” or like last night and the afternoon before, “… your wait time will exceed one hour.”

I don’t get it. I’m ready to give them money (in most cases). All they have to do is answer their phone. Is that so hard?

Now, before you think me a luddite. I mostly transact on line and am actually pretty good at it. But if you’re dealing with Telus, you can’t cancel a landline without calling in (a one hour wait for the chance to be talked out of it). If it’s Westjet, you can’t change a flight without calling in (30-40 minutes). And when TD Visa urgently wants you to call in for a security issue, which has happened to me three times recently, it never takes less than a not-so-urgent half hour.

Admittedly, I’m on a bad streak, but it does feel like an epidemic. These companies make it hard to find the right phone number and then don’t answer it when you call. They’re clearly not worried about competition or technological disruption.

At Steadyhand, we’ve been dealing with clients for ten and a half years. Our ethic from day one has been to answer our phones as quickly as possible. It comes from one of our company values, which is to ‘not waste our clients time’. This means we send clients as few emails as possible and pick up our phones 10 hours a day.

We’re going through a healthy growth phase right now, so we’re not always perfect, but our team works at it, we track it and Neil is always looking for ways to improve our technology.

I’m often surprised by how positively clients react to getting their call answered, or getting a quick email response, but as I think about it, I shouldn’t be. Other service companies have set the bar very low.

In closing, two things to note. First, Scott also did a post on this topic in 2011. And second, I wrote and edited this blog while on hold with one of the companies named above.