Posted: 21st Feb, 2004 By: MarkJ
ISP AOL UK has stated that the high cost of providing customer support, which is greater than it had anticipated, is one of the biggest challenges facing the industry:
Speaking at the ISP Forum in London this week, Carr admitted that the cost of providing customers with free support is extremely high, and in fact, much higher than the company had anticipated.
"A key thing on our agenda is trying to bring those costs down," he said, adding that one of the other key issues in the industry, broadband wholesale competition - or rather the lack of it - is partly to blame for the high support costs.
For example, he said that 20% of people in the UK move home every year, yet BT has no system in place that makes it easy for people to switch their broadband connection, which often means the customer has to make a number of calls to their ISP, driving support costs up.AOL goes on to state that the matter isn't helped by BT being unable to inform ISPs immediately when there's an outage on the network. More @
netimperative.com .