The Plenary Session of Congress has approved, with a vast majority (there has only been one negative vote, while Vox and Junts abstained), the law that regulates customer service and that, among its measures, limits the wait to three minutes customer service telephone service and regulates robotic service.
The first norm approved in this area “in the history of Spain”, as defended by the Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, affects entities that provide basic services of a general interest and is especially intended to protect all citizens, but especially the most vulnerable to poor care.
Specifically, the regulation will affect companies that provide water and energy supply and distribution services; transport of passengers by air, rail, sea or inland waterway, bus or coach; postal services; electronic and telephone communications and financial services. Also to large companies (more than 250 workers), regardless of the sector. But not to the companies of the Administration, something that was criticized by the majority of the parliamentary groups.
The text approved, and which is now going to the Senate, prohibits the use of answering machines or other similar means as an “exclusive means of attention” and, at the request of the consumer, when a query, complaint, claim or incident communication is made by telephone or electronic, the company “has to guarantee personalized attention”.
Said personalized attention will be provided “as soon as possible” from its request by the clientele, “guaranteeing” that 95% of the requests are attended to, “on average, in a period of less than three minutes”.
At the same time, for basic services of general interest that are provided continuously, attention will be available 24 hours a day for the communication of incidents related to the continuity of the service. In the case of successive treatment contracts linked to said services (a service is provided or a good is sold over a long period of time), queries about its continuity must be answered within two hours. .
In all other cases, queries, complaints, claims or incidents, which must also be dealt with in the co-official languages, will generally be resolved within a maximum of fifteen business days.
The law establishes that entities that provide basic services of a general interest must have a “universally accessible, inclusive, non-discriminatory and evaluable” service and must make the “necessary” means of support available to these people. providing them with “the individualized and personal assistance that is required” and, in the event that the service is provided in person, having measures that “facilitate accessibility to information and communication”.
The socialist spokesperson, Marisol Sánchez Jódar, defended that this law will serve to “avoid not a few headaches for citizens”, who, in her opinion, have “suffered impotence in the face of some customer service services, endless waits, answers that never arrive, conversations with machines and endless processesâ€. She also praised “that a basic service cannot be cut off while there is a claim in progress” and that the customer service “serves to attend to queries and that service is not used to introduce other contracts.”
For Podemos, it is a law that “does not pretend to be just empty paper and will be complied with because it provides for audit mechanisms and sanctions in case of non-compliance.”
The PP believes that the approved law is “good for consumers, although it could be improved.”
