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Tuesday, February 11, 2014

PRESTO call center receives up to 30,000 calls monthly, only 25-50 of them (that's quite the spread) are daily complaints - Toronto Star report

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem and judging by this recent Toronto Star article, PRESTO struggles with accepting accountability for passenger complaints with PRESTO's executive vice-president only admitting that PRESTO "has dropped the ball" and blamed "growth" for the issues.

Are we to accept this explanation? Nope. Does PRESTO's executive vice-president expect a pat on the head and a nod with a smile from those of us who have been impacted by this ball-dropping because we're only 0.01 per cent of the problems? Nope.

PRESTO works well when a person only has to tap on at Station A to go to work and tap on again at Station B to go home from work. Where PRESTO needs improvement has been chronicled in my PRESTO chronicles - stories that have been submitted to this site that document flaws as precise as the writers could manage.

PRESTO is far from perfect but we're being told it will get better and it has to. I have collected enough ground-level passenger scenarios experienced by PRESTO customers that have revealed fatal flaws from inconsistent travel windows, miscalculated over-rides and bus-train transfers underpayments that remain unresolved.

I don't care if there are only 25-50 of us PRESTO customers a month whose problems can't be fixed on the first try. It's 25-50 too many.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The article reads to me that there's 25-50 a day that can't be resolved. That seems like an awful lot to me. Between 9000 and 18000 a year??

Anonymous said...

Just did the math here. 360k calls a year. 9125-18250 of them can't be resolved. That's 2.5 to 5 percent of calls. And that's only including the people who know to call...people who notice an issue. not everyone does. Way to go Presto!

I don't even know why they went there with giving a silly number of how many calls aren't resolved same-day. Isn't it more concerning that with a million users you're fielding 360,000 calls a year (36 percent of people therefore having a problem requiring a call to be resolved)?

C.J. Smith said...

^ YES.

Peter said...

Hmmm ... 25-50 a day that can't be resolved on the first go round. Based on my observations of the disinformation dispensed by Metrolinx Twitter Ops and Customer Relations, that number doesn't surprise me. How many queries actually receive the right answer?

Anonymous said...

Q: How do you know when senior management is serving up only "truthiness"?
A: Their lips are moving.

In the words of Kevin O'Leary, "it's time to whack this bozo".

Squiggles said...

Wow. I did have a problem last fall with an online load. And since then, I always go up to the teller to refill. I ended up calling about 3 times and received 3 different stories as to where my money went.

Basically, the online load took my money right away and nothing appeared on my account. Period. 3 phone calls to find out that I had to wait a week for the money to either make it's way to my card or be returned to my bank account. It was not a pleasant month as things ended up stretched pretty tight as I didn't plan on having to put double the amount on PRESTO. Grrr. No sympathy from the call-taker. And I ended up putting in a complaint about person 2 (of three) who out-right lied and couldn't care less that their system was broken.

Anyway, since then, I make my way to a teller to put money on. No sense in dealing with that same issue again.

This article is just lip-service and irks. It doesn't make the situation better. It makes it worse.

George said...

You think it's bad now, just wait until the call center is outsourced to India.

Far too many calls and Presto is crap in all areas but fare collection. There it's moderately acceptable.

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