Yesterday, the Council of Ministers approved the Customer Service Services Bill. Consumers will be able to demand, once the deadlines are met, to receive telephone attention in an agile, free and personalized way.
The long waits on the phone When we contact customer service, their corresponding background music is a thing of the past. At least partially. Yesterday, the Council of Ministers approved the referral to the Cortes Generales of the Draft Law on Customer Service Services. A rule that was already close to being approved during the last legislature and that has not been until now when it has been definitively given the green light.
This new legal framework, for whose parliamentary processing an urgent procedure has been requested, will apply to all large companies. Except for those that have already imposed sector regulations, and any other company that presents the following services, regardless of its size: water and energy, transport or postal, financial or telephone services. However, it will not have application in administration.
Three minutes
The normative reduce to three minutes The maximum waiting time that customers can wait before being assisted to receive information, make a claim or manage a post-sales service. And this limit must be met in, at least, 95% of calls.
One of the aspects that the law focuses on is personalized attention. For it, “prohibits the use of automatic answering machines or other similar means as the exclusive means of customer service”. Furthermore, he emphasizes that “at any time during the interaction”, the client may request to speak with a person, instead of with a voiceover or any other automated message.
Another novelty has to do with the way in which companies manage long waiting lists. From now on, a call cannot be ended because the company argues that there is already a long waiting time. A fairly common scenario depending on which companies.
15 days
The law too reduces the deadline from 30 to 15 days maximum that a company must respond to a claim or complaint. So everything that has to do with the management of after-sales services will also be considerably streamlined. In addition, companies that offer services that are considered basic will have a maximum of two hours to provide consumers with information on how and when the problem will be resolved.
The schedules have also been another of the spotlights. Customer service departments will have to be available to consumers during business hours. Except for companies that offer basic servicessuch as water, electricity, internet or transportation, when attention will have to be guaranteed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We also wanted to emphasize the need to improve customer services for groups that are considered vulnerable, such as people with a low level of digitalization or the elderly. Customer service services must provide individualized assistance to all those who require it.
In the event that companies fail to comply with these obligations, the sanctions will range between 150 and 100,000 euros, depending on severity. And, in addition, companies will have the obligation to measure their improvements in customer service through external audits that are responsible for their parameterization.
