Your Call Is Important To Us (24 page)

Down-on-their-luck Canadian provinces are also excellent sites for your call center. The favorable exchange rate is part of the charm, as are the tax incentives from cash-strapped local governments. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have been wooing call centers as a way of boosting employment rates, and there are some big cubicle farms out in the Halifax sprawl, where pals of mine take office supply orders from bored Pentagon secretaries and try to straighten out erroneous cell phone charges for irate Texans. Maritimers are polite, friendly, and poor, and the fact that the government picks up the tab for health insurance attracts plenty of American companies, such as Xerox, to our fair shores.

Nova Scotia’s governments have sold call center jobs as an alternative to lost jobs in fishing and manufacturing. The province claims that the payroll tax incentives they offer are worthwhile, if they can lure the kind of jobs that pay about 10 clams an hour, and provide some benefits. However, some outfits have only lasted as long as the incentives have. A Sears catalog outlet lasted barely a year, despite six-figure subsidies. Moreover, as the Canadian dollar climbs, the Great White North becomes less competitive, wage-wise, making Nova Scotia but one stop on a race to the bottom of the labor-costs barrel. India is an increasingly popular call center outsource; their English is pretty good, and they work for four times less money than their North American coevals.

Of course, the only thing cheaper than brown people is robots. This is why the ATM is everywhere and bank teller is just about the only service job in decline. If a website or workbot can do the job, and serve us without seeing us or speaking to us, then the company saves a bundle. Most big companies have set up websites, in the hope that we’ll do everything online, or on the phone. Some companies have set up genuinely helpful sites; others have erected cordons sanitaires. Your call, whether it’s to your bank, phone company, cable company, or airline, hardly ever goes straight to a person. I’m downright discombobulated nowadays when I call a company and don’t get the dulcet tones of that voice-mail woman, the Lady Hal. The Lady Hal greets you with a menu of prompts, each one a different route for your call. This is important, because Repairs may be outsourced to a different center than Billing. You are also encouraged to punch in the strings of digits that attach themselves, lamprey-like, to any and all transactions. This is so your information will “pop up” on the employee’s computer when the CSR finally takes your call. Some companies allow you to fill prescriptions, or do some banking, by simply punching in the appropriate numbers. A call that stays in the voice-mail system costs the company only pennies; a call between people costs dollars. This is one of the reasons why IVR, otherwise known as Interactive Voice Response, is the talk of the call center industry. Instead of punching in your numbers, and waiting on hold for a rep, the whole transaction is gloriously person-free. You’ll simply tell the Lady Hal exactly what to do.

Of course, many of us have already told her exactly what to do, and where to go, while languishing for seemingly interminable periods listening to lickspittle from the Lady Hal. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard her intone the phrases, “We are experiencing higher than usual call volumes,” “Your call will be answered in priority sequence,” and the Big Lie, “Your call is important to us,” I wouldn’t be writing this book. I’d be charging admission and selling snacks at my fabulous roadside attraction, Nickel Mountain. When you are waiting on hold, all the things you have been promised as a customer go out the window. You are not always right, and you are no king. You are just another cluster of digits in the priority sequence.

The factory-floor model of labor, where unskilled persons perform repetitive tasks repeatedly, works fine if you’re drilling some holes or welding a chassis. It does not work so well when the task is to explain to a consumer why their computer is having seizures, or to track a series of payments through a digital labyrinth. Your bank, or airline, or cable company provides a complex array of services, each with its own set of codes and prohibitions and prices, all stored on legions of computers, manned by many fallible individuals. A million things can go wrong, and they do. But when you try to rectify your problems, insult is added to injury. Most businesses do not hire enough front-line customer service personnel, so you have to suffer infuriating wait times. Then, once you finally get to speak to someone, he or she simply does not have the expertise, or the incentive, or the authority to fix your problem. Should your request be beyond the bounds of the CSR’s limited powers, the next step is to transfer you to another department, which may be in an entirely different call center, and may involve waiting in another priority sequence. Or, your CSR can call for a supervisor. In call center lingo, they call the call for a supervisor “escalation.” Escalation is discouraged, since there are generally far fewer supervisors than there are employees. Industry figures put the ratio at about ten employees per supervisor, but my anecdotal survey suggests this is a generous estimate. This is why, when you ask an unhelpful employee to transfer you to a supervisor, you go back into the holding pattern for a while. And even though you can’t hear them, behind the wall of Muzak and the stylings of the Lady Hal, they can always hear you, swearing and sputtering.

Call centers don’t have to be voice-mail hells. There are some that boast high customer satisfaction ratings, and they share a few common traits, all of which make perfect sense. First, good call centers spend time training their people, so they are informed about the services their companies provide. Second, they hire more personnel, which cuts down on annoying wait times and encourages workers to spend more time with each customer. Third, they pay their workers better and offer opportunities for promotion. But all this costs money that companies would prefer to spend elsewhere, like on their advertising, say.

This is another of the problems with service today, the great honking oversell of advertising. A doctrine that decrees that one is always right is a doctrine that is bound to disappoint. Companies pitch some serious woo when they’re trying to build a relationship with you. Throughout the balmy boom, companies promised us the moon. The new technology was going to make every transaction as easy as clicking a mouse, or phoning it in. Unfortunately, the technology still needs lots of people to run it, labor that big companies are not willing to pay for. Throughout the nineties, despite all the technological improvements in the service industry, customer satisfaction fell. According to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, a study conducted by the University of Michigan, it slid downhill from 1994, when the survey started, till 1998. Customer satisfaction levels bounced up and down around the turn of the millennium, but then September 11 made shopping a patriotic imperative and the scores rose, borne aloft by zero percent financing. However, the most recent estimates from the ACSI, for the last quarter of 2004, show customer satisfaction levels at a record low, dropping to a score of 73.6 out of 100.

This wasn’t a huge decline. Customer satisfaction scores have been around 75 points for the duration of the study. That’s only a C. And this study is funded by the industries it analyzes, so one would expect it to skew in their favor. Moreover, some behemoths didn’t do nearly as well as you might expect them to do. Wal-Mart’s been on the slippity-slide since the survey started, from a score of 80 in 1994 to their latest score, 70, for the fourth quarter of 2004. McDonald’s scored a 63 in 1994, and it has bounced around the low sixties and high fifties ever since. The most recent quarterly figures, from 2003, put Mickey D’s at 64, comparable to the hated airlines. People don’t go to these places for the service. What kind of service do McDonald’s employees or Wal-Mart workers perform? It’s pretty much the bare minimum. They heat stuff up and hand it to you, or they get things off the shelf and ring them in. The best-ranked company on the survey, with a score of 84, was e-tailer Amazon.com, a company where all the workers are totally invisible. You simply serve yourself online, in the comfort of your home, and the products just show up at your door. Poof! No interactions with fumbling, diffident employees, just a hit of straight-up commerce, quick and sure and pure.

The computer has allowed companies like Amazon to customize customer service, but not always in a good way. In keeping with the old business chestnut that 80 percent of the profits come from 20 percent of the customers, service is becoming increasingly stratified according to income. Better data collection means that companies are better able to engage in financial profiling. Computers make it easier for companies to figure out exactly how much it costs them to help you, and exactly how much your business is worth to them. As an article in
BusinessWeek
put it, a tad melodramatically, “Welcome to the new consumer apartheid.” One bank grades all its customers with a color code that pops up whenever they call; greens are the big spenders, reds the losers, and yellows the in-betweeners. The CSRs tailor the transaction accordingly. If you’re poor, you can expect the same serve-yourself model that prevails at Wal-Mart. If you’re a high roller, you can expect premium service:
Your
call is important to them.

We may kvetch about the decline of old-school, hands-on, informed service, but when we shop, we consistently opt for the quick and the cheap. Consequently, most service sucks because serving people sucks. Why do a good job if you don’t have a good job? The top ten jobs are the top ten jobs in part because most of them have high turnover rates; they’re gigs that people leave in months, not years. Most people drift from call centers to big-boxes to fast-food joints. They feel no loyalty to or compunctions about their ginormous, distant employers, and it shows. Even Henry Ford figured out that you had to pay your workers enough to afford the things they produced in order to run a sustainable business, a lesson lost on most service and retail employers. And yet, in spite of all these glum stats about poorly paid workers delivering C-level service, and households maintaining their right to buy via mounting debt loads, free-marketeers insist that this is the system that works, the one thing that satisfies our wants and needs. The market isn’t just the best economic system, though it’s certainly that, by leaps and bounds, like a Porsche is better than a splintery old oxcart. No, marketeers go on and on and on as if all this buying and selling is the sole feat of human organization functioning as it should, and use the market as the benchmark for other services, like government, schools, and hospitals. You are no longer a citizen, a student, or a patient; you’re a customer. Hooray, everyone is number one! What a load of steaming number two.

CHAPTER NINE

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

—A.J. L
IEBLING

I
am a news junkie. When I was young, I dreamed of being a dashing, righteous foreign correspondent, à la Christiane Amanpour. I imagined speaking truth to power from war-torn wherever. I even enrolled in journalism school. After a term, I realized I hated interviewing people. I didn’t like writing in industry-standard inverted pyramids. I didn’t like leaving the house, let alone jetting off to still-sizzling, recently wrecked locales. I excelled at lying on my couch in my pajamas reading long, boring things and writing short, amusing things, so I changed majors, and became a professional nerd. But I never lost J-school habits like reading a couple of papers and watching the news every day. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet have brought me hours—nay, years—of wonkish pleasure. Consequently, it pains me to take my beloved free press to task. But I chide and chastise because I care, and because the media are such an important part of the bullshit pandemic. The media are a critical line of defense against, and a great disseminator of, bullshit. They have the power to make shit up, let shit slide, or make sure that the shit hits the fan.

A variety of vocal constituencies think that the Main Stream Media (MSM) are full of shit. Right-wingers accuse the media of liberal bias. Liberals accuse the media of being shills for Bush and big business. Old-school, retired journalists have written a number of books arguing that the profession is in dire straits. A number of scandals, in particular the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair imbroglios, gave the media the opportunity to hate the media, and engage in many column inches of anxious self-examination. Bloggers of both political persuasions have debunked or scooped MSM stories, and have made incursions into MSM domains like political conventions. Hell, even the president disdains the media. When a reporter asked Bush which news outlets he preferred, he replied that he didn’t really care for any of them. He doesn’t bother with the distortions of the press. He has people he trusts to tell him what is going on.