It seems NTL are not the only ISP laying off staff in the heavily competitive global telecoms market.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4755103.stmAOL, the internet arm of Time Warner, is to sack 1,300 of its US call centre staff because, it said, customers are now better equipped to help themselves.
It is closing its Jacksonville, Florida centre and making further cuts in Ogden, Utah and Tucson, Arizona.
The volume of calls to its centres has halved since 2004, AOL said.
It follows 700 posts being lost in the final quarter of last year when a call centre in Orlando was closed.
Customers have become more internet "savvy" and had better tools to resolve their own technical problems, said spokesman Nicholas Graham.
Is this penalising the customers for being too clever in sorting out their own problems ?
Looking further we see the real reason for this drastic loss,
AOL had 26.7 million customers in September 2002, but this had fallen by more than 25% by last December
Through its European operation AOL Europe, the company serves about 6 million customers in Britain, France and Germany.
I expect this is being a bit too heavy handed of them but as a userbase shrinks its only to be expected that the support regime would shrink with it.
