The UK PRS industry has got a boost thanks to changes in how customer complaints can be handled.
Until now, one of the biggest issues with PRS has been handling customers who get bill shock – and this has contributed to MNOs and L1s and 2s shying away from running such services in the UK. But help is at hand.
Building on years of experience in the telemedia industry and experience of handling customer care, compliance and digital community management, The Consumer Care Service (COCASE) – part of the Cute Media Group – has been formed to help both the industry and consumers get the most out of PRS and to help the industry grow.
“We don’t operate any PRS services ourselves so we can be totally independent and neutral, which allows us to defend the consumer’s rights as well as acting in the best interests of the service providers,” explains COCASE CEO Andrew Fisher. “We are experienced at interpreting when a refund is rightfully due and when it isn’t andhave earnedthe trust of our clients to execute those refunds quickly, which again helps to defuse anger and protect reputations.”
This need for speed and efficient communication is a key part of what COCASE brings to the thorny issue of PRS complaints. Until now, customers who experience problems often don’t know where to turn and call anyone from the publisher who ran the ad they first saw the service in, to the service provider, to the network operator or the regulator. Often they would be passed around, resentment and anger building, so that complaints easily escalate.
“COCASE runs native English speaking agents from its Brighton HQ, around the UK, the US, Australia and parts of mainland Europe to handle complaints 24×7,” says Fisher. “We follow the sun and allow consumers to call up when they detect a problem and want to deal with it.”
This ability to handle things quickly, knowledgeably and efficiently are key drivers for setting up a third party contact and complaint handling service.
The company has already handled more than a million support cases over the years and through that experience it has consolidated all that knowledge to create COCASE. The company has also created the Xaps platform, a proprietary, bespoke technology suite, which is cloud based and uses state of the art call queueing and routing tech, bespoke IVR,automated opt outs and reporting.
In addition, the company will analyse calls and complaints to form a feedback loop that, in theory, will let the company not only resolve these issues, but help service providers constantly update services so to remove pain points and make the industry much more effective at being entertaining.
“It creates a virtuous circle,” says Fisher. “By enhancing customer experience, you increase customer happiness, this reduces complaints and escalations, which improves the commercial environment, which creates and better customer experience – and things should just get better and better.”
And the industry has welcomed the move. Kevin Dawson from Oxygen 8 told us that: “Any positive steps to manage consumer issues are very useful and show an industry making its own efforts to survive, build and grow.”
Rob Weisz, CEO of Fonix echoes this: “Anything that will provide consumers with a faster, more efficient and knowledgeable response from call centre agents to support a mobile billing enquiry is only a good thing and something that I think the whole market would welcome. As an industry we must strive to improve the awareness and experience of mobile operator billing and having dedicated expertise in consumer care is a good thing.”
