Hanging on the Phone

Living

Tired of hanging on for a good phone service

David Hewson

From the Sunday Times, November 9.

In the beginning, there was the Operator. She gave way to the Dial. That went to the Push Button. And that begat the Call Queueing System.

You spend ages on the phone doing anything but talk to a human being.
My future ceased to be Orange the other day. After waiting two years in vain for the mobile-phone service to reach my new address I decided to give up and use one that did. And my, was it an educational experience trying to talk to one of our shiny new phone companies and tell them to take a hike.
Telecom giants love to waffle on about the joys of a world that revolves around the phone. If you believe the hype they put out, we are all enjoying an era of unrivalled customer service, delivered 24 hours a day by smiling munchkins in call centres up and down the land.
What they mean by this, of course, is that you spend ages on the phone doing anything but talk to an intelligent human being. A machine answers your call. A machine asks you to listen to a robotic voice droning on about buttons that must be followed by the hash key. Or was that the star? Then, after five minutes of listening to some dire Phil Collins, a voice answers the phone, asks you for your details and a password then reveals he is the wrong person. Ten minutes later - a touch more, in Orange's case, this is a phone company - someone else comes on, you go through the same password routine and, with a bit of luck, you get down to business.
"Ooh," said the Orange lady. "Why do you want to cancel?" Let me throw together a few casual reasons. The coverage is lousy where I live. It's cheaper to upgrade with Vodafone. And the only way I can use Orange in Spain, and a lot of other places too, is to buy a fat, ugly dual-band phone. Furthermore . . . "Okay," the woman says. "Just send us a fax." Five minutes later it's dispatched and I'm happily anticipating a wire-free future that works.

Half an hour of calls with a supposedly modern telecommunications company to achieve absolutely nothing.
Now it is important to understand that the nightmare of the call centre does not end when you put down the phone. These places are the modern equivalent of the 19th-century dark satanic mill. They have the same, deeply incompetent work processes, too. So, four days later, a letter comes through the post saying the company cannot cancel the account because I failed to sign the fax. I go to the PC and print off an exact copy of the document that Orange received (aren't computers wonderful sometimes?). Sure enough, there is my digitised signature.
I phone the number on the letter and go through the ritual exchange of details again. Oh, says the lady, we're not the department that deals with that. But, I point out, this is the number on the letter. And here comes Phil Collins again, a five-minute wait . . . and, after the details dance, the wrong person. A while later - we are now into an 11-minute call for which I am paying since my Orange phone doesn't work - a chirpy youth comes on the line and tells me the fax wasn't signed, because his screen tells him so. "But I have got the actual computer printout in front of me," I say. "And my signature is there." "Ah," he crows. "But computers can't fax signatures."
At this stage I realise I am going to have to hang up as I have a technological idiot on the line. In one week I have notched up half an hour of calls with a supposedly modern telecommunications company and achieved absolutely nothing.
The service I received from Orange was dreadful - one of the worst in my experience - but the company is not alone here. In recent weeks I have been left hanging on by BT on several occasions, by a couple of banks and one extremely thick electricity company. And all these people have bought the phone system, installed the network, and created that most wonderful of things, a call centre.
Why? To make their lives easier, of course. To stop them having to answer letters. And to make it so difficult for dissatisfied customers to complain that in the end they give up. With few exceptions, the insidious technology of the call centre is the bane of modern consumer life. In future, given the choice, I'm going to deal only with companies that answer the phone before the fourth ring, with a human voice that says: "How can I help you?"

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Create: February 13 99


	You spend ages on the phone doing anything but talk to a human being.	My future ceased to be Orange the other day. After waiting two years in vain for the mobile-phone service to reach my new address I decided to give up and use one that did. And my, was it an educational experience trying to talk to one of our shiny new phone companies and tell them to take a hike. Telecom giants love to waffle on about the joys of a world that revolves around the phone. If you believe the hype they put out, we are all enjoying an era of unrivalled customer service, delivered 24 hours a day by smiling munchkins in call centres up and down the land. What they mean by this, of course, is that you spend ages on the phone doing anything but talk to an intelligent human being. A machine answers your call. A machine asks you to listen to a robotic voice droning on about buttons that must be followed by the hash key. Or was that the star? Then, after five minutes of listening to some dire Phil Collins, a voice answers the phone, asks you for your details and a password then reveals *he is the wrong person*. Ten minutes later - a touch more, in Orange's case, this is a phone company - someone else comes on, you go through the same password routine and, with a bit of luck, you get down to business. "Ooh," said the Orange lady. "Why do you want to cancel?" Let me throw together a few casual reasons. The coverage is lousy where I live. It's cheaper to upgrade with Vodafone. And the only way I can use Orange in Spain, and a lot of other places too, is to buy a fat, ugly dual-band phone. Furthermore . . . "Okay," the woman says. "Just send us a fax." Five minutes later it's dispatched and I'm happily anticipating a wire-free future that works.
	Half an hour of calls with a supposedly modern telecommunications company to achieve absolutely nothing.	Now it is important to understand that the nightmare of the call centre does not end when you put down the phone. These places are the modern equivalent of the 19th-century dark satanic mill. They have the same, deeply incompetent work processes, too. So, four days later, a letter comes through the post saying the company cannot cancel the account because I failed to sign the fax. I go to the PC and print off an exact copy of the document that Orange received (aren't computers wonderful sometimes?). Sure enough, there is my digitised signature. I phone the number on the letter and go through the ritual exchange of details again. Oh, says the lady, we're not the department that deals with that. But, I point out, this is the number on the letter. And here comes Phil Collins again, a five-minute wait . . . and, after the details dance, the wrong person. A while later - we are now into an 11-minute call for which I am paying since my Orange phone doesn't work - a chirpy youth comes on the line and tells me the fax wasn't signed, because his screen tells him so. "But I have got the actual computer printout in front of me," I say. "And my signature is there." "Ah," he crows. "But computers can't fax signatures." At this stage I realise I am going to have to hang up as I have a technological idiot on the line. In one week I have notched up half an hour of calls with a supposedly modern telecommunications company and achieved absolutely nothing. The service I received from Orange was dreadful - one of the worst in my experience - but the company is not alone here. In recent weeks I have been left hanging on by BT on several occasions, by a couple of banks and one extremely thick electricity company. And all these people have bought the phone system, installed the network, and created that most wonderful of things, a call centre. Why? To make their lives easier, of course. To stop them having to answer letters. And to make it so difficult for dissatisfied customers to complain that in the end they give up. With few exceptions, the insidious technology of the call centre is the bane of modern consumer life. In future, given the choice, I'm going to deal only with companies that answer the phone before the fourth ring, with a human voice that says: "How can I help you?"