Viewer Rage

Saw the Cutting Edge documentary on Channel 4 last night. Called “Phone Rage”, it said it was going show what it was like to be inside the call centre being shouted at, rather than outside doing the shouting.

On a very basic level it did do that. For somebody who’s never been inside a call centre, it would have been interesting to see the interior of Powergen & First Direct’s UK call centres. But that’s about where the revelations started and stopped.

The producers had found three rather unlovable specimens of customers – albeit with genuine gripes about the service they were getting. None of them were really being let down by the call centres themselves - they were victims of failures of process elsewhere in the organisation (mobile phone not being sent to one chap, another woman being billed twice for her gas bills). We didn’t see how their frustrations were solved – they just served as examples of the kind of stroppy punter we all have to cope with in the call centre from time to time.

What was frustratingly un-illuminating was the footage in the call centres themselves. We learned about “super agents” – that they were going to save the day. Trouble was, we didn’t learn the difference between a “super agent” and ordinary agent, so that told us nothing. We learned that some of the agents actually wanted to do things other than working in the contact centre (signing, acting, that sort of thing). Actually, my original career choices were astranought (to the age of 9) and then musician (to the age of, well I still do really...) - but I’ve buckled down and accepted reality eventually.

We then went on a Channel 4 funded trip to South Africa (India’s been done by the BBC and the Dispatches prog. on security, so the producers got their long-haul jolly in Cape Town instead) and we saw a prospective call centre agent soften her accent and buy some “corporate” clothes. Actually, that bit was really depressing…..

So what did I learn?

• At First Direct you can earn a cream egg for telling somebody they had a tremendous postcode
• At Powergen, the agents are super
• Near Cape Town, agents don’t have to wear the “corporate” clothes if it’s a Bank Holiday in the UK
• That some British people are a bit unpleasantly racist about foreigners

And my overwhelming feeling after watching? That was an hour of my life I would never get back…..

Now I could be being too harsh. Being a bit of an insider, I shouldn’t really have expected to learn a lot. But my long-suffering wife was made to watch it too, and she wasn’t much better informed afterwards than before. Don’t get me wrong, if the program has the effect of making the public think of people working in call centres as human beings and shout less, then that will be a good thing. But the thing that will really stop people shouting will be when we stop making mistakes – when we send out the promised mobile phone, when we don’t collect the gas direct debit twice, and when we keep our promises about following things up. That’s about process and quality, and about the call centre being part of the organisation rather than a customer service veneer stuck on top to handle the flack.

What’s more, if the health & safety people get onto obesity in the workplace, it’ll be an apple you’ll earn for commending the quality of postcode – not the cream egg.