Press 1 if you’re as tired of those loathsome call centres as I am!
THERE is a village called Sherbrooke in Nova Scotia where they do things the old way. If you want a hook to nail on your door or a poker for your fire, you go to the blacksmith – who will fix you right up while you wait. For no extra charge, he will pretend never to have heard of Ikea.
If you need a sign to be made, go to the printer’s shop and watch him prepare it on his press. You can just picture him in the local tavern days later, asking how that new sign is working out for you.
‘Oh, it’s hanging in there,’ you can hear yourself joshing.
Perhaps they should have a museum village like this in the Old Scotia too, just to remind ourselves how it used to be.
If I dig hard enough, I can still dredge up a memory or two. I remember my brother’s broken bicycle being taken to a blacksmith’s in St Andrews. The guy had an anvil and everything.
In the greengrocer, they used to pinch two corners of your bag of apples and swing it around on itself a couple of times, sealing the deal.
Today we pick our own apples, do our own bagging and, more often than not, our own check-out too. And this is among the more relaxing of modern business transactions. Maybe it’s because there is no one there to argue with.
We, the consumer, and those we do business with have travelled far, perhaps too far, from the simple, mutually beneficial ways of Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia.
Along the way, consumers have become tetchy, mistrusting, paranoid pains in the behind given to exaggerated gesticulations and extreme impoliteness.
That is because we are dealing with grasping, unscrupulous, opportunistic blackguards hiding behind battalions of telephonists with pre-prepared scripts at call centres.
We should face facts. We hate them and they despise us.
Nowhere is this mutual animosity more evident than in the world of insurance, where customer loyalty is routinely punished by ever higher annual premiums.
‘You have been with us for five years and we despise you,’ is the message to customers from this particular business model. ‘We’re going to keep putting your premiums up because we know you’re too lazy to check what you paid last year or go to the bother of shopping around.’
‘I know you’re diddling me and I hate you back,’ we reply. ‘You’re lucky I’m busy with other things right now.’
Hatred
Only when the hatred keeps us awake at night do we force ourselves to investigate how inexpensively we could be insured with another firm – which, we know very well, despises us no less than the first and, in years to come, will prove it.
This week, the Financial Conduct Authority finally intervened in the racket by ordering insurance firms to detail on customers’ renewal letters what they paid last time. A positive move, certainly, but the damage is done. We already know what insurance companies think of loyal customers.
Pressure is being heaped on broadband companies, meanwhile, to be honest about internet speeds. Currently, providers can use the phrase ‘up to’ if 10 per cent of their customers can achieve the speeds claimed. Again, I am not sensing much love for the consumer.
A broadband provider I used to deal with spent years sending literature telling me how wonderful I was. ‘You’re totally brilliant. We love customers like you,’ typical missives would begin.
They hate customers like me. We argued constantly on the occasions I was able to raise someone at the call centre. The last time we spoke was a grim and financially punitive exorcism in which a demented voice kept asking: ‘And if I pay this you’ll be out of my life for ever?’ It sounded a little like mine.
But we need insurance and broadband and satellite TV and a mortgage and gas and electricity, just as the providers of these services need us. And so we co-exist in a state of perpetual mutual resentment, like warring spouses who can neither divorce nor patch things up.
In the town centre commercial units that were once occupied by greengrocers and ironmongers, adolescent salesmen talk grannies through their iPhone options, pinging techy terminology at them for kicks. Do they notice the other pensioners shuddering as they pass by outside, dreading the day they have to put themselves through this humiliation again?
I doubt it. These are pitiless times where technophobia among the elderly is not a problem to be overcome, but an opportunity to exploit.
This is the age of airlines punishing passengers who have not managed to print out their own boarding passes.
We live in a commercial environment in which banks make it clear which customers they are happiest to deal with – the ones they do not have to deal with. That is why people who do their banking on the internet get better deals on accounts, while those who prefer to look them in the eye are penalised.
Irritable
Some businesses are less lucky. They have no choice but to meet their public – and have long since forgotten even to feign interest.
Witness, for example, the scene at typical car hire desks at major European airports. Watch as group after group of irritable passengers go head to head with sullen, underpaid employees working to a script designed to make customers fork out more than they agreed.
Watch the reciprocal loathing with which business is conducted, see those irritable heads shaking and those sullen eyes giving not a fig and wonder where it is all going to end.
Well, I know I can behave better. But isn’t there a killing to be made by the business which can behave better still? We are a long way from Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia, but is our conception of a deal so very different? I still value a fair one.