Question: what are the eight most annoying words in the English language? Answer: “Your call is important to us … please hold.” But when you have turned into a gibbering wreck after 10 minutes of your valuable time have ticked away – intermittently punctuated by assurances that, while your tormentor is “experiencing high call volumes at the moment”, nevertheless your call is still important to him/her/it – you can take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. In fact, you belong to the majority of sentient beings in an industrial society like ours.
Thanks to a useful piece of market research, we now have an idea of the numbers of victims of this industrial practice – at least in the UK. Asurvey commissioned by the New Britain Projectthinktank found that the average Briton spends between 28 and 41 minutes every week coping with inefficient customer service systems, and that nearly four-fifths of them are frustrated by “the wasted time, the unnecessary friction, and the quiet resignation that has become part of daily interactions with both public and private services”.
The survey found that bookingNHSor GP appointments was the most frustrating experience, but contacting local council services, energy suppliers, train companies, broadband suppliers, insurance firms and banks were also high on the annoyance scale.
The demographics of sufferers are interesting. Predictably, middle-aged people (35-44) are the most frustrated, but younger people (18-34) also spend a lot of time “on hold”. And, intriguingly, Reform UK supporters seem significantly more frustrated than supporters of other parties – especially when it comes to contacting NHS and council services.
This last finding is perhaps the most significant message provided by the survey. It suggests that call fatigue has a political dimension. At any rate, the thinktank that commissioned the survey thinks so. “Voters are increasingly fed up with a system that wastes their time,” it says. “The danger is that this frustration is no longer just background noise, it’s now shaping political behaviour. This isn’t just annoying, it’s political. If ministers don’t fix the systems people deal with every day, they risk losing voters to parties that want to tear the whole system down.”
There’s something in that. Most voters are not interested in politics. They couldn’t give a toss about whether GDP figures are up or down; nor are they exercised about the difference between a recession and a depression. But they do care passionately about some things that are rarely discussed by inhabitants of the Westminster bubble. One is being kept on hold for five minutes while trying to get aGP appointmentmore than a month ahead. Another is thestate of the country’s roads– especially in urban areas where streets are increasingly coming to resemble dried riverbeds.
These are public-sector problems for which governments and local authorities have responsibility. But the New Britain Project needs to acknowledge that the “on hold” problem is also (perhaps mostly) an excrescence of the private sector. It’s a creation of a corporate mindset that is happy to sell products or services to people but wants to have as little as possible to do with them afterwards. For many senior executives, customer service is a tiresome and expensive business which involves employing people to deal with the public.
The reflex corporate response to this challenge was to outsource the task to call centres, initially located in the UK but later in lower-wage economies overseas. As internet use increased, though, customer service functions were increasingly delegated to websites with which customers could interact. In some contexts – where care and expertise has gone into the design of the site’s interface – this has worked reasonably well. But even when it’s done properly, there are always cases where the available options provided to the user do not match the complexity of his or her requirements.
Car insurance sites, for example, are generally fine if you’re trying to do a straightforward transaction: get a quote; renew a policy; make a claim; register a change of address. But if you have an inquiry that doesn’t fall into these categories then in the end you will have to make a phone call. And then you wind up listening to appalling muzak while being assured that your call is important.
Sadly, the New Britain Project has no proposals for how the private sector could reduce the levels of quiet desperation to which its practices reduce people. But it does have suggestions about what the public sector could do. These include: creating an open-source, centrally supported website platform (gov.local) for local authorities, along the lines of gov.uk; reforming and coordinating local authority procurement of IT services so that there is real competition for the work; mandating common data standards across public services; and making the NHS app and nhs.uk the default digital front door for GP services.
All sensible ideas. But don’t try phoning the New Britain Project about them. Their website doesn’t give their number.
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