“Your Call Is Important To Us”

The recorded voice on the other end of the phone insists that your call is important to them. Not important enough that they are going to answer it anytime soon though, because they are “experiencing higher than normal call volumes,” as if there were any other type of call volumes.

It didn’t used to be this way, but once upon a time we didn’t have to ring our energy provider, our cable TV provider, our internet service provider, or our mobile phone company to fix some problem or error on their part. My parents were supplied with electricity and gas by the nationalised London Electricity Board and North Thames Gas; the landline telephone (and they didn’t get one till I was a teenager) was from the General Post Office and TV channels were free (TV Licence apart) and came through the aerial in the loft. My mum and dad didn’t have a bank account until sometime in the 1970s, before that whatever money they saved went into the Post Office.

Bills came in quarterly and were paid in cash at the Post Office. The rent was paid in cash to the rent man who called each week, likewise instalments on insurance policies. Problems were few and far between; if the power went out it was because the whole area had a power cut. There was much less to go wrong and years would pass before my parents had cause to contact anyone with a problem about anything.

It’s different today.

There’s a whole raft of different energy suppliers eager to sell you gas and electricity at a bewildering array of tariffs. There are cable and satellite TV companies, who may or may not be the same company that provides you with broadband; there are numerous mobile phone companies, and any number of banks and other financial institutions offering a wide range of different savings and loan products. And that wide range of highly sophisticated and specialised services and products means one thing: There are more things to go wrong, and go wrong they do, all too frequently. It’s bad enough that things go wrong because getting them fixed is always a challenge, but the first hurdle to get over is actually getting in touch with someone who can help.

You know how it goes; you’ve got a problem with one of the companies that supplies you with something, gas, electricity, cable TV, the internet. They’ve done something wrong. Typically, they’ve charged you incorrectly and you need to speak to someone to fix it, so you go on their website and click the link that says “Contact Us.” What you now see are barriers to actually communicating with them going up.

“Chat to us online,” they offer. So you do. What you get is a bot that wants to direct you through a very narrow and limited set of options and which is really no more than a sort of interactive version of their FAQs. Want to chat to an actual human being? No chance. Perhaps you would like to email them. There’s likely not an actual email address, more likely a web form which, in my experience is no more likely to produce a response than the chat bot does. Ideally, you’d like to phone them but there are plenty of websites that don’t list a phone number under Contact Us, so you Google it, and lo and behold, there’s a number that some previously frustrated customer has found and published, so you ring it.

Back in the days before Call Centres were a thing, ringing a bank or a utility company either got you through to someone straight away or you got an engaged tone, in which case you kept redialling till you did get someone. That was frustrating in itself, particularly in the days of rotary dial telephones that had no redial facility, but eventually you got through. Now you dial the number and listen to an interminable menu of options and, having chosen the one you think most closely resembles the one you need, you listen to the announcement: “Your call is held in a queue and will be answered by the next available operator.” If you’re lucky, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes or more later, a real person says, “Hello,” if you’re unlucky then you’ll encounter something that seems to be happening frequently now and which is completely unacceptable in my view.

I first encountered it with Scottish Power. It wasn’t even my problem. My late mother-in-law had been receiving emails from them even though she didn’t use Scottish Power. Someone with a similar email address had obviously set up their online account incorrectly. There wasn’t really any responsibility on my part to do anything but I thought I’d be helpful and bring it to Scottish Power’s attention, so I rang – several times. I never got to speak to anyone because their automated response was to the effect that they were very busy, too busy to take my call in fact, and that I should try again later so they were disconnecting the call.

Twitter and Google eventually connected me to someone in the CEO’s office. We spoke on the phone and she offered me a telephone number, different from the Call Centre number, to call in the event of further problems, which there were. When I called the number I got the Call Centre, the message, and a dial tone.

This week Val had reason to call P&O Cruises. She wanted to speak to Customer Services. No one answered the phone of course, instead there was a message to the effect that all their agents were busy and that it was unacceptable to make customers wait. She should call back “at a later date,” the message said, then the call was disconnected. More acceptable to simply cut people off than ask them to wait in a queue, it seems.

Finally, Virgin Media. A slightly different story here as I’ve had to call them on a number of occasions recently after we accidentally subscribed to Netflix and wanted it cancelled. On the plus side, on the three or four occasions I’ve called, I’ve been connected to a real person within an acceptable length of time. The downside has been that the people I have spoken with have been universally hopeless – in one conversation I was actually told that I should have been aware of how Virgin Media’s internal processes work, even though the person I had previously spoken to clearly didn’t! Virgin actually phoned me after one call, not to sort out the problem of course, but to ask further questions about the less than complimentary answers I had supplied on an online feedback form about how my problem had been solved – or not solved, I should say.

The long and the short of it is that we are now living in an age when communication should be quick, easy, efficient, and achievable through a variety of channels. What we have are organisations that erect barriers to communication, leaving customers frustrated and often out of pocket while they try and get their problems sorted.

The pretence of solving customers’ problems is now slipping:  By not even taking calls, organisations are crossing their fingers and hoping that people give up, go away, and accept whatever errors and poor service is being foisted upon them. We mustn’t let them get away with it.