Your call is important to us...and other great whoppers

Jonathan Brocklebank

IN an age over-burdened with digital cares, there should be something reassuringly analogue about a sleeper train service with simple aims.

These should certainly include the following: 1: Leave on time. 2: Keep passengers fed and watered until they slope off to their cabins and conk out to the sound of whispered clickety-clacks below their pillows.

3: Arrive on time and bid said passengers, refreshed and with a banana muffin secreted in their pockets, good day.

Achieve these modest objectives and, from the customer’s point of view, the rest should all be upside.

No airport security officers confiscating your toothpaste. No one ordering you to stuff your bag all the way into a tester cage or else give them more money. Indeed, no requirement to engage with another living soul. Night, night, world. Wake me at Euston.

So when the Caledonian Sleeper relaunched to much ado this year with deluxe carriages, double mattresses and en suite loos, it should have been the perfect antidote to the dismal airport experience with which we have become so well acquainted.

Appalling

But instead of offering passengers a portal to a halcyon yesteryear when stuff generally worked if you were prepared to pay for it, the Serco-operated Sleeper has itself been tugged into the digital age where very little works, no matter how much you pay.

Its timekeeping is appalling (when it isn’t cancelled altogether) and, on one recent service, a trainload of passengers had to be woken up and decanted onto buses. Sleep well, sir? Sorry, no muffins today.

Last weekend on the Inverness to London service there was no food or drink available at all due to staff shortages. One assumes the shortages are not unrelated to the fact that, according to their unions, some staff are at ‘breaking point’ with stress brought on by prolonged exposure to customer dissatisfaction.

It is a by now familiar and decidedly 21st-century vicious circle: customers indignant at yet more shoddy treatment vent their frustration at the service’s first line of defence – underpaid automatons with limited pat responses and little to offer in the way of solutions.

Their general powerlessness inflames customer fury still further, which heightens staff stress and absenteeism, resulting in yet more apologies for services unrendered.

For those of us who remember analogue problem-solving, when dealing with a complaint meant applying initiative to finding solutions, it can be particularly tough to adjust to digital problem-solving, which means applying the least wrong pre-programmed solution, even if it solves nothing.

Let me give you an example from personal experience. Back in the days when sleeper trains generally did fulfil the aims set out above, a cartoon bird called Buzby came on TV and urged us to make someone happy with a phone call.

He was part of a marketing campaign by Post Office Telecommunications, which later became British Telecommunications and now goes under a much abbreviated name which I struggle to say without setting off facial tics.

Make someone happy? My telecommunications with this organisation bring only sorrow at both ends of the line.

They make me unhappy because I am a paying customer with expectations – informed by their promises – which are not being met. They irk me because my life is busy and I resent having to spend so much of my time on the phone to people forever apologising and never fixing. They vex me because they unleash a ranting, antagonised version of an otherwise mildmannered soul on blameless call centre workers in India who doubtless have frustrations of their own.

Complainer

‘Mr Jonathan, please,’ one of them said. ‘Just give me one more chance to fix this for you.’

‘I’ve been hearing this for weeks.’

‘Twenty-four hours, that’s all I ask...’

She was remarkably good. She sounded like her life depended on it.

Two days later, another telephonist in Delhi gave me exactly the same spiel. I am the complainer and I am thinking of blocking their calls.

But the truth is we, my subcontinent fixers and I, are both victims of the same malevolent force – digital problem-solving. They are almost as powerless as customers are to apply solutions or speak to the people in a position to apply them. The telephonists are there to absorb ire, to make promises they do not have the clout to keep and, surely, little more.

The irony, of course, is we live in an age supposedly more obsessed with customer care than any in the history of commerce. It is all but impossible to do business on the phone or online without being bombarded with pleas for reviews of the quality of your interface with their employees.

Do they ever read them? Or is it really just an exercise in harvesting data for future targeted advertising?

We live in times where practically everything on sale anywhere has been reviewed by someone, somewhere – from six-figure Lamborghini supercars to paper clips at 60p for 100.

How is it possible in the face of these oceans of data still to exhibit such superhuman levels of customer service cluelessness? By assuming that the way to fix everything is by putting ever more clever technology on the case.

And how is that going so far?

Seriously, if you want to sort out the Sleepers and much else that fails to deliver in the digital world, put a computerilliterate human in charge.