Pedro Innecco

As I wrote in my previous post about the reforms required in Brazil in order to open its economy to foreign organisations, I discussed how Brazil with all its incumbent problems has an excellent track of customer rights; which I yet have to see it being matched by an European country.

Now the Brazilian president signed a decree that imposes new regulations for call centres (source). If you have ever suffered in the hands of poor service delivery through call centres then get ready to feel avenged. You’ll love this!

From 31^st July 2008 all companies that provide the following services (amongst others) will have two months to adapt their call centres to the new legislation:

• telephony;
• communications;
• water supply;
• electricity supply;
• terrestrial transportation;
• airline transportation;
• financial services (including credit cards); and
• health insurance.

The new legislation enforces the following decrees:

• The decrees were divided in five groups: access, quality, transparency, cancelation (of services) and general rules;
• For services of uninterruptible supply (e.g.: water and electricity, cable TV and telephony), all call centres must be available 24 hours, 7 days a week;
• Companies must provide a unique FREE phone number to attend their variety of services;
• A customer call can only be transferred once from one customer care operator to another, in order to ensure that customers don’t have to overly repeat their issue;
• Customers have the right to request a case history in order to track the resolution progress of their query;
• Customers must have the option to override a telephone based menu at any time and request to speak with an operator;
• Service cancelations must take effect immediately; and
• Companies that fail to follow these regulations could be fined to a sum of up to R$3,000,000.00, in accordance with the Código de Defesa do Consumidor (Consumers Defence Code).

Now can you imagine if companies such as BT and Sky ever had to follow a similar decree? One can hope, if ever…