Incompetent Agents

[#1]

I don’t believe the title is ‘strong’. This incident clearly shows that the Agents involved didn’t have a clue, didn’t want to discuss the actual issue and trotted our scripted responses, some of which were wholly irrelevant. In this case ‘incompetent’ is appropriate. It may not be in other cases. I was merely curious as to other people’s experiences.
It has not been escalated, it seems there in nobody in a senior position to escalate to.

[#2]

@alant

Agents are non-technical people, specifically employed to, as you put it, "trot out scripted answers". So, trotting out scripted answers does not make the agents incompetent, it merely means somebody at a higher level needs to recheck whether their scripts are giving the correct information and to revise them if not.

A review at a higher level should normally be invoked by using the complaints procedure https://giffgaff.com/support/complaints -- which should presumably operate on three levels:

• did the agents do the job they are being paid to do?
• should the instructions given to the agents be changed in any way?
• should giffgaff consider changes to its documentation or rules to reduce future misunderstanding

Much of the discussion in this thread is not about whether the agents gave the correct answer according to giffgaff's implemetation of EU roaming, but about whether the giffgaff rules comply with the EU rules. That ought to be raised as a separate issue -- it's nothing to do with the "competence" of the agents and if anything needs to change, it's giffgaff's rules and/or documentation, rather than the behaviour of the agents.

[#3]

The thread was meant to ask a simple question (as has been pointed out by me previously).

Agents are (as far as I'm concerned) the technical support layer in gg support. If not, then who is? One of my family had a problem which required an answer, the agents clearly couldn't answer (one even tried to answer a question which wasn't asked).

When asked to escalate to somebody who could deal with the problem....."that can't be done".

So we end up with a problem that has not been resolved and isn't likely to be as they've closed the case (i.e. taken the easy option). Sounds like incompetence to me (definition: ineptitude, ineptness, inability, lack of ability, incapability, incapacity, lack of skill, lack of proficiency, amateurishness, inexpertness, clumsiness, ineffectiveness, inadequacy, deficiency, inefficiency, ineffectuality, ineffectualness, insufficiency).

[#4]

Hi folks

At the request of the topic author we have been asked to lock this thread. And so to respect their wishes we have done so.

Regards

Dez