Surviving Customer Services (Part 1)

Once upon a time, when you needed customer service, you turned up at the business in question, found your way to the special office dedicated to just that, and pinged a bell on counter. One harmonious, self-important moment later someone would pop out of the back office to provide you with the kind of service that a customer could expect. The person behind the counter didn’t pretend that you had suddenly become invisible. He or she didn’t put on a funny accent and claim you weren’t speaking English. They didn’t start screaming at you like you had developed a third eye, horns, a reddish skin complexion and threatened to consume their firstborn children in some blood-curdling demon orgy, when all you had really asked was if you could get a refund on a jar of mouldy raspberry jam.

Of course, this good, solid kind of customer service was magical in that way that things remembered are, untempered by any kind of reality (and as such the world that Daily Mail readers still live in). You forget the wait time that stretched back into the dark ages and you’d be joining behind someone with the black death and that these desks were staffed by pustulant ogres who could burp the stench of Satan’s recently filled shit-can as though they had eaten garlic pickled dead babies for lunch. But these were the good old days when the world was rendered in black and white, slavery was OK, and World Wars were the character-building equivalent of gap years for the nation’s youth. Like it still is for Daily Mail readers.

Times have been a changing though. Firstly, there came the Internet, a magical system of global electronic spaghetti invented by men looking for a viable alternative to buying their porn from the newsagent (usually best sandwiched between two slices of semi-respectable newspapers). And for those who couldn’t reach the heights of the top shelf, the only other option was to spend their time smut-foraging in road-side hedgerows and verges like hungry foxes in search of the pornographic equivalent of a half-eaten Ginster's pasty. It’s no wonder several collective pulsating, febrile tonnes of male brain worked together to achieve such a marvel of modern communications technology.

Despite the humble aims of the internet, it redefined the world as we know it. We can now squeeze our entire lives through a wire, in the same way as forcing an whole pig through an industrial sausage machine produces budget-friendly strings of reprocessed meat products The outside is that place glimpsed over the top of your glowing monitor, somewhere that makes your eyes feel slightly nervous, like middle-aged men caught outside a school at going-home time. It also created an opportunity. A devilishly brilliant opportunity that Satan himself wished he had patented. Outsourcing. Why not farm out your service operations to dim-and-distant places no one had previously heard about, such as Kirkcaldy and Hyderabad, and effectively any other place where the likelihood of your being understood is low-to-negligible. This lack of communication is instantly useful, since they may well be solving your problem or making it worse, you simply can’t possibly know, which reduces your number of avenues for complaint. Of course, you know you’d get the same responses from them if you composed entire sentences solely out of the words ‘pork pie’ and shouted them down the phone, like a madman in Greggs.

Now, in 2011, Apple can invent a phone that understands you. Even if you shout “pork pie” at it, it remains unfazed, and probably gives you directions to Melton Mowbray. It’s a phone that could get more GCSEs than the average schoolchild and can tell the capitals of countries you can’t even spell. Yet customer services provides a working home for a mutual lack of understanding. They don’t understand you. You don’t understand them. And to be fair, they don’t even understand themselves. It’s like everyones caught a virulent brain disease that makes them shout in Klingon at each other for several minutes before the unstoppable urge to munch brains takes over and puts a finally bloody full stop to it all.

To be continued...