So the moral is, try to speak to the MD or directors when you encounter 'procedure ignorance' and let them know the idiocy of their procedure without human intelligence.
The misery of the call centre experience shows customer and employee alike are dragged down in the name of efficiency
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- The Guardian,
- Thursday August 14 2008
- Article history
A few weeks ago I was listening to a news report about Boots's treatment of a 12-year-old schoolgirl whom they had detained for trying out a dab of nail polish from a bottle that wasn't a tester. The minute the polish touched Hannah Gilbert's nail she was stopped by a security guard, told she had committed a crime, and marched into an office. Three policemen were called to the scene. The policemen checked to see whether she had a criminal record. Boots then summoned Hannah's parents, who were told that unless they paid the full (£6.29) cost of the nail polish, Hannah would be charged with theft. After more than an hour of detention, the shocked child was released.
What I wanted to know was how Boots would apologise for this ludicrous, heavy-handed overreaction by junior staff. Why had they called the police when a tap on the shoulder and a 30-second lecture on the difference between testers and pristine bottles would have been enough?Why indeed had a permanently overstretched police force decided that this was one of its priorities? How would a company that needs to keep the custom of teenage girls in these credit-crunchy times redeem itself?
Boots's head office was quite clear. There was no apology. Their statement was prim and self-congratulatory: "Our staff were following set procedures."
This isn't a defence, but a monstrous smoke screen. It's an increasingly common and chilling variation of the old defence of the indefensible, "I'm just doing my job". Too many organisations seem to imagine that sticking to procedures is in itself a virtue. That's not how it feels to those of us at the receiving end of this inflexible, wooden approach. Too often it feels as if we're being corralled into a cage made by madmen, pleading for some kind of intelligence or humanity from the person in front of us or on the end of the phone.
Earlier this summer my father, who is in his late 70s and disabled, had a stroke. It happened on a Friday, and my distraught mother rang in the late afternoon to say that he had collapsed, and could neither walk nor speak. She was calling the neighbours around their remote hillside in rural Wales to see whether they could help her lift him up.
Forty-five minutes later I called her back but there was no reply. Fifteen minutes later: "This number is not recognised."
In a panic, I rang BT. The first person I spoke to was in an Indian call centre. Could he check the line please; this was an emergency. He asked me for the account number. What account number? The telephone number? No, he needed to know the account number before he was permitted to check the line. How would I find it? By asking the account holder. "But that's why I'm ringing you! I can't speak to the account holder because something's gone wrong with your line!" Then he couldn't help me. Well, could he transfer me to customer services, or the engineers?
Number, name, postcode, account number. Desperate, I explained the situation to person number two. This one was in England. She told me there was no record of my parents' line. And that, as far as she was concerned, was that. Please, I said, look again. This line existed until an hour ago. Meanwhile my father might be dying on a Welsh hillside. Complete indifference from person number two. I plead to be transferred to someone else.
I explain everything again to person number three. She finds the line and confirms that it has been cut off that afternoon. I know this isn't about bills, this is some madness. Can it be reconnected as a matter of emergency? She's not interested in my emergency. Nothing can be done until BT can determine why it has been cut off. I am transferred to person number four.
It is now an hour into the call.
Number, name, postcode, account number. It turns out BT has been confused over the validity of the line, whatever that means. It is their mistake. They do not care. The engineers have gone home and I cannot talk directly to them anyway. I will have to go on a list for reconnection which could be a fortnight.Tearful, I ask if the wait can be shortened for cases like this. The answer is no. Person number four is as bored by me as the rest have been. Not one has said they're sorry - either for the situation, or for BT's mistake. Can I speak to a manager? No, they've left. No, there's no one else who can help. If I want to make an appointment for reconnection, I will have to speak to person number five.
Person number five offers me a date. It is a month away. Incredulous, with knots of fear in my stomach, I explain it all again. No reaction. This is the system, she says. Do I want to make the appointment or not? Because if I don't wish to accept it, she will terminate the call. As an afterthought, and because it's clearly on the script, she asks: "And is there anything else I can help you with today?"
I put down the phone and burst into tears.
It has been an 80-minute call, and I have either been listening to machines, or conversing with automatons throughout. The indifference of the system feels brutal, and I can't break through it. It is now seven o'clock. As a last resort, I ring directory inquiries and ask them to put me through not to the faults line, but to BT's head office.
A real person answers the phone. She is a middle-aged Welsh woman with a comfortable voice, and when I tell her why I'm ringing, the first thing she says is: "Oh dear! That sounds terrible!" She is the chairman's secretary, and she isn't following any script. She says immediately that she has a list of managers and she will start ringing them now until she finds one who will deal with it and call me back. And she does. The phone is reconnected within 40 hours, and many apologies sent to my father as he recovers.
We have all had miserable experiences like these, often as companies try to increase efficiency by giving workers templates to work from, and by outsourcing work to call centres here and abroad. It's better for them if every client can be fitted into the pattern which makes their work simplest. Yet this attitude also runs the risk of damaging what is supposed to be their core purpose: keeping customers satisfied.
Cary Cooper, professor of management at Lancaster University, says that too many companies imagine that, in rule-bound workplaces, employees will still recognise that solving customers' problems must come first. In practice the majority of employees are too frightened of getting things wrong to make that effort, he says. Give them a procedure and they'll follow it blindly. And that's the real test. BT may have apologised where Boots was unrepentant, but nothing in BT's procedures or attitudes will stop the same thing happening to someone else tomorrow.
Working to rules, with no opportunity to use your initiative, must be as depressing for employees as it is for us on the receiving end. Companies must be calculating that the frustration on both sides matters less than cutting costs. Maybe they're right. If we disagree, it's up to us to demonstrate it - where we can - by using consumer power to reward the ones that do respond on a human level.
