Easyjet’s customer complaints line comes second in the first league table of worst wait times at UK call centres.
British Airways also makes the rudest call centre list for cutting off customers who are either waiting in a phone queue, or cutting them off without even answering their call.
This happens to 4% of calls to the BA contact centre, according to the list compiled from more than 10,000 test calls made to more than 3,000 UK call centres between February and April.
The league reveals that people spend on average five days a year being kept on hold, which equates to 2% of the UK economy being wasted.
However, EasyJet questioned the validity of the survey. A spokesman said: “easyJet welcomes independent surveys that are conducted with a transparent and statistically rigorous way, unfortunately this survey was neither transparent or statistically rigorous and in no way reflects our customer waiting times, which we constantly monitor to ensure customers receive a good service from us.
“In the last six months we have answered over half a million calls to our UK call centre number. On average over 80% of our customers wait less than 60 seconds to speak with one of our customer service team and only 5% of customers wait approximately two minutes or more.”
Technology entrepreneur Matt King analysed thousands of calls to create a list of the Top 10 worst waits.
If a caller had tried to contact all of the Top 10 worst-wait call centres using a mobile phone, they would have wasted a huge £94 just for the privilege of queuing to speak to a customer advisor, the research by King’s company WeQ4U found.
The worst offender was InHealth Netcare, a service used by National Health Service staff and patients to access test results, followed by easyJet’s customer complaints phone line.
Others in the top ten are customer services at parcel delivery service Yodel, TV provider Sky/Freesat, T-Mobile Direct, Apple UK, Ikea and HM Revenue and Customs, highighted as the UK’s rudest call centre.
WeQ4U founder King said: “UK callers waste five working days a year waiting to get through to busy UK customer call centres.
“That’s five whole days of productivity which will be wiped off of the new tax working year for every single person who wants to talk to a customer advisor at one of the UK’s service organisations. 2% of the UK economy wasted to be precise.
“That’s why we have declared April 16 National Queue Awareness Day because it’s the date in the new tax year when people’s lives are finally taken off hold and they can get on with contributing to UK plc instead.”
He added: “Technology has reached a point where there really is no excuse for this level of inefficiency. We will be repeating this exercise in three months’ time to find out if any of the main perpetrators have bothered to clean up their act.”