Hanging on the Telephone

Well done us! Yet again the call centre world tops a poll of the "baddest of the bad" - this time a survey done for BBC2 about what makes us angry. When I first heard it I shrugged my shoulders, thought "here we go again" and got on with concentrating my rage on something properly annoying (resurfacing work on the road to Weybridge as it happened).

But then I got to thinking. The public have had contact centres to deal with for a long time now.

We know that sometimes it takes a while to get through (although we're getting better - see Top50 in Customer Service - 58% get through in less than 60 seconds). Yet that's still peanuts with the time it takes to actually go and see somebody face to face or write them a letter. Even, perhaps I could venture, than powering up the PC, finding their website, remembering your on-line password and navigating the website.

So why the rage?

I have two theories.

Firstly, the messaging we give people simply gets their backs up. "Your call is important to us" sounds less convincing the third or fourth time you hear it and "all of our operators are busy at the moment" is insulting - the only alternative being "we can't be arsed to speak to you at the moment because we're all playing on the new Wii Fit". Some honesty would be be refreshing here. "We're really sorry we can't handle your call straight away. We hope to get to you within 2 minutes, meanwhile here's something funny to listen to" would make me happy. Also, the increasing use of "call-back" technology that means punters can get on with their lives rather than listen to pledges of sincerity interspersed with royalty-free business-friendly musac.

Secondly, I fear that the phone itself is part of the problem. It's the "narrow pipe" scenario espoused by Guy Fielding all those years ago. A disembodied voice (human or machine) without the benefit of body language and a human face desensitises us to the impact of our shouty actions when we finally get through. We may get cross queueing at the bar or at the supermarket check-out, but we can see that the people we are waiting for are busy, and that they have a lot of work to do serving fellow customers. Accentuating the human nature of the contact centre will help here - and any ideas on how we do that would be very welcome.