Unreachable call centres : a new trend ?

AI agents and callbots are appealing to CFOs and Customer Service directors, who are keen to automate and replace everything. Velux seems to be succumbing to this trend, which is a pity. 

Velux relies on the reliability of its products and the Tour de France, particularly the women's race, rather than on the availability of its customer service, which is curiously over-automated. Is this a harmful trend?

We discussed this with CustomerGauge, the software company that wanted to know if we would recommend Velux. And Anne-Christine Ravaux, the group's director of operations, in France.

The experience: purchasing GGL 5 blinds the day before the women's Tour de France passed through Savoie.

Like many other omnichannel consumer brands, Velux offers its customers the option of contacting its call centre if they have a problem, need after-sales service or spare parts, or want to finalise an order. But it seems that this call centre has... closed its doors. The six options for connecting with an agent programmed into the interactive voice response system result in a robotic message in five out of six cases: visit the website. To make a comparison, we are dealing with a brand that has rented five shops, no door in a shopping street, which encourages prospects to visit and displays on the shop doors: we are closed, please visit our website. It imposes a 100% digital customer journey at the very moment when the customer wants to engage with the brand. It is easy to understand why the ‘enshitification’ of the customer experience, a fundamental trend, has become the subject of a book that will be released soon. The company, whose parent company is preparing to buy Tryba, responded to us and explained.

When calling 0806 801 515, Velux's customer service number in France, 90% of callers and customers with outstanding issues are redirected to the website and FAQ section. We tried this ourselves when we wanted to order GGL 5 blackout blinds online. The website's ergonomics and user experience are complex, and we couldn't find the product reference, so we ended up calling the call centre, like 80% of people worldwide :)

After twelve minutes of trying all the options offered by the IVR (interactive voice response) system, we managed to reach an agent, who told us that the product couldn't be ordered online... we had to go to a store, such as Castorama or Leroy Merlin... the product is international.

When contacted by us, Velux management confirmed that this IVR setup is indeed a deliberate choice: ‘Often, people who contact us have not visited the website beforehand. We prefer them to do so. But by pressing 6, they can speak to a person.’

In our case, the call centre agent sidestepped the issue: ‘Your reference number is an international reference number, you need to go to a large retailer to order it.’

After escalating the issue and contacting the operations management team, we discovered that the response provided by the call centre, which was quick once we managed to reach a call centre agent, was rather inaccurate. ‘The reference is simply difficult to find on the website, but it can be ordered online,’ says Karine Brisset, manager at Velux. "Furthermore, the confirmation that all conversations are recorded is also false. The message indicated on the IVR: your conversation may be recorded is correct, but not the one from S, who answered us.

Poor responsiveness, inaccurate information, web interfaces and complex product indexing on the website – we are a long way from the quality and performance associated with Velux's image. And it's easy to understand why so many customers are frustrated: unresponsive customer service, chatbots that don't understand and are useless, etc.

Why don't companies want to answer the phone anymore?
‘Simply to be more profitable, because human interaction is more expensive than access to an FAQ,’ says FD, a specialist in CRM and customer experience. The experience you describe, of pressing 1, 2 or 3, etc. and being redirected to the website, is symptomatic of a fundamental shift: the elimination of human interaction, which is viewed solely from a cost perspective. Conversational agents will take over in this mad rush, but they can also be used to complement existing systems, making them more accessible and easier to reach."

Read more from Velux in our next issue and in the section: Call me the director.

Surprising choices
The product was delivered quickly and on time by GLS, despite being sent to a rural location, as was the questionnaire measuring satisfaction and NPS, managed by the specialist Dutch publisher Customer Gauge.

Known and renowned for its reliability and image of robustness and dependability, the company continues to invest in communication, advertising and sponsorship in order to remain attractive. Why these radical choices of automation  in after-sales service or when it comes to improving accessibility?

“This trend is at work in many large companies, which continue to view customer relations as a problem, a financial burden,” says Holden Caufield*. They are succumbing to a fad, that of indiscriminate, extreme automation. What we reported with LCL, which became completely unreachable due to the haphazard installation of software, stems from the same choices. But in the case of Velux, the frustrating experience was due to the organisational choices made in the contact centre and the lack of speech analytics. Someone who contacts the call centre four times in less than fifteen minutes should, and could, be routed directly to an agent. And the double error made by the latter should be flagged. S is mistaken about how to order a reference and about the systematisation of recordings. And no process for correcting these errors seems to be in place.

*Holden Caufield is in charge of the Call Me the Director section at En-Contact.

**According to our information, the platform used by Velux for its CRM and multi-channel contact management is provided by one of the world's largest publishers and allows for these settings and coupling, via APIs, to speech analytics tools.

For a long time, Velux, the Danish company based in France, where it employs more than 1,000 people, has emphasised the quality and reliability of its products and after-sales service. When a problem arises with a Velux product or it needs to be replaced, the promise of quality and availability is now far from being fulfilled. The average rating that the company receives on customer review sites has also deteriorated significantly.

Its Danish shareholder, Dovista-VKR, has announced the upcoming acquisition of Tryba, the manufacturer and installer of PVC windows and exterior joinery in France.

Didier D., an installer of swimming pools and pool robots in particular, confirms this deadly trend: ‘To sell more, brands that used to focus on quality have started selling directly on the web, where price remains the number one purchasing criterion. A pool robot from a major brand in 2025 is of much lower quality than what we found ten years ago.’

Enshitiffication, the ‘crapification’ of the customer experience, is underway. It is a shame that companies such as Velux are joining this trend. A book has been written on this subject. Read it here

The Velux call centre is based in France, in Morangis, at the company's headquarters. Comearth is its long-standing BPO partner, located in Orsay. Thanks to Karine Brisset and Anne-Christine Ravaux from Velux France who helped us out on Friday 1 August. But if we weren't journalists and just ordinary people, who would have helped us? The chatbot, the IVR? Ouch, ouch, ouch...