The Hann Perspective: My Number is Up

The most regrettable business development of my lifetime has been the relentless drive to downgrade the skills and wages of the average worker so as to maximise corporate profitability, and hence the related salaries and bonuses of top management.

I recently did some work for a restaurant company and encountered a research report lambasting it for falling behind its peers by not “deskilling” its kitchens.

Because why go to the expense of having a meal cooked by a trained chef when someone with the IQ of a rather backward Border terrier could just slam it in a microwave?

Not that you the customer would receive any discount for that, obviously. The saving would simply enhance the company’s bottom line.

Similarly, having long ago trained us to select our shopping ourselves, why should supermarkets employ several workers to scan the stuff at the tills, when you could pay just one to glower at us doing it for them?

The supreme example of ‘deskilling’ is, of course, the automated call centre. Mrs Hann was literally reduced to tears by one the other day as she ran the apparently endless gamut of multiple choice questions. She pleaded loudly just to speak to a fellow human, though soon wished that she had stuck with the robot.

A friendly Indian call centre

It was all to do with personalised number plates: a vain and stupid affectation, I know, but handy for those of us with failing memories.

I have one on my own car that begins ‘AI’. This seemed uncontroversial until I went to stay with a vet friend recently, and he asked what on Earth I knew about Artificial Insemination. Not as much as he does, that’s for sure. I once made the mistake of asking if he could lend me a cool box for a picnic, and ended up walking across the lawn at Glyndebourne bearing a large polystyrene box across which was blazoned in large red letters ‘Semen: Handle With Care’.

I bought another number containing the initials ‘XPR’ to celebrate my retirement from the public relations business. When I had to re-apply my nose to the grindstone, I donated this to my wife, who has been vainly trying to arrange its transfer from her old car to a new one she is buying. Dealing with our insurance company’s call centre has all but destroyed her will to live. And the bottom line is that the new car, which she hasn’t got, is now insured. While the old one, which she actually needs to drive, is not.

I have waged an equally wearing battle with my electricity supplier’s call centre for years. They consistently refuse to believe my own meter readings. Often they won’t believe their own meter reader’s efforts, either. The last time he gained access to my house they insisted on sending someone else around shortly afterwards to install a brand new meter, but it hasn’t helped. A month ago they sent me an estimated bill for several thousand pounds, with a proposal to settle this by increasing my direct debit by 400% to around £700 per month.

After voluble protests, they finally agreed to use my own meter readings, but then transposed the day and night numbers (for I have the old-fashioned Economy 7 rate for storage heaters) with the result that my debt went up by another few hundred pounds and my monthly direct debit to £800.

Eventually they acknowledged this mistake and sent me an accurate bill, but were still proposing to charge me the £800 a month. Which, the latest call centre person admitted, was more than she earned in a month.

This at least demonstrated that I was dealing with someone here in the UK, rather than one of the overseas call centres so beloved of banks, insurers and BT (Bangalore Telecom) where £800 per annum would probably be considered an enviable wage.

I liked it when you could go into an old-fashioned bricks and mortar building and sort things out with an old-fashioned flesh and blood human being who knew what their customer was talking about.

If I have to speak to a call centre at all, I want to deal with well-trained, well-informed and charming people. The sort I could share a pint with after they have solved all my problems for me. And, above all, I want to talk to a Geordie. So let’s all commit ourselves to North East job creation by affecting accents so thick that only a fellow Geordie can hope to understand us.

The nation's sweetheart: howay, pet!

People from other regions consistently report that they find the accent reassuring. And why stop at UK domination? Once Wor Cheryl has won over the doubters in the US, we should be aiming to take over call centre duties for the whole of North America, too, before giving our friends in India a taste of their own medicine.

Keith Hann is currently a PR consultant, but is likely to be seeking work in a call centre quite soon – www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Anyone know about teeth and speak English?

The low point of last week was the blazing row that culminated in the sacking of my dentist. Oddly enough, the argument had nothing to do with my teeth.

It arose because, a month or so ago, I received a demand for £70 for an allegedly overdue bill for dental treatment. There were several reasons why I could not understand this, one of which was that the money was supposedly owed by my wife, who has only visited my dentist once and certainly not on the date claimed in the statement. But more importantly because I have always paid for our treatment before leaving his surgery, mainly in the belief that I would be rugby tackled to the ground if I tried to do anything else.

So I rang up to query it, forgetting that my dentist has made the business-limiting move of employing a receptionist who can neither speak nor understand English particularly well. After five minutes of mutual incomprehension that seemed more like a long weekend in an offshore call centre, I gave up.

Then I made the critical mistake of thinking that I really ought to put matters straight. So I wrote a nice, clear letter to the dentist himself, foolishly ignoring the near inevitability of its interception by the aforementioned receptionist. Who promptly rang me up and began blithering unintelligibly all over again. I suppose I must have lost my temper. At any rate, an HR lady for the client in whose offices I was working at the time told me that I would have been sacked for the resulting outburst if I had been one of her employees, which luckily I am not.

Is it safe? Trust me, Dustin, it's nothing compared with the agony of dealing with my ex-dentist's receptionist

Interestingly, the objection seemed to be simply to the volume of my comments rather than their content, or even to the colourful obscenity with which I rounded them off. So luckily I did not need to cite our great national treasure, the polymath Stephen Fry, in support of my contention that the hackneyed claim that using bad language denotes a limited vocabulary is complete expletive deleted.

Others in the area of the explosion were more sympathetic, particularly the man who regularly rings a contact centre in India because his broadband has stopped working, to be asked “Have you tried using our online support service?” To which he replies, according to mood, “What part of ‘my broadband has stopped working’ do you not understand?” or “Is that your idea of a really funny joke in Bombay?”

Apparently the latter always brings the phone crashing down at the other end. I suggested he tried saying “Mumbai” in future to see if that improves matters.

I relieved my feelings by writing another letter to my dentist explaining why I would not be using him any more, and taking the precaution of marking the envelope “Strictly Personal”.

The effects were instantaneous. First his receptionist rang up to offer a grovelling apology, though she had to do so in a voicemail message as I could not bear to pick up the phone when I saw who was calling me.

Then the dentist rang in person, leaving another message in which he explained that the bill had been sent to me in error and that he could not be sorrier that I had been inconvenienced in this way. He added that he would be writing to me, so it came as no surprise when a letter from his surgery landed on my doormat yesterday morning.

The content was a bit of a surprise, though. It was another statement of account reminding me that my wife has owed them £70 since October 2010 and demanding that I pay it by return of post.

Can anyone recommend a dentist who is good with nervous patients, employs staff who speak English and has a rather more robust system of accounting?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Is NHS Direct the wrong prescription?

As a stern, unbending Tory, I naturally applaud the idea of cutting Government spending. But the cuts need to be made with the keen eye and steady hand of a top surgeon, not by a half-blind madman wielding a scythe.

If you had asked me a year ago whether it was right to scrap the NHS Direct helpline, as the Government plans to do, I would instantly have agreed that it was a huge waste of money, providing cushy jobs for nurses and succour for hypochondriacs.

But that was before I took the huge leap into the unknown of becoming a first-time parent, and faced the endless succession of coughs, rashes, swellings, bumps and abrasions that probably amount to nothing but might just be the herald of that potentially fatal condition you would never forgive yourself for failing to detect.

My wife has found the nurses of NHS Direct invaluable at providing timely advice and reassurance. Her many friends with year-old babies all speak highly of the service, too.

How can it possibly save money to get rid of it, when in most instances the alternative would be a visit to a GP or an A&E Department, at infinitely greater cost to the NHS?

The minister concerned says that the same service can be provided more cost-effectively through the new “111” non-emergency number, now being piloted right here.

And the key, money-saving difference? Apparently fewer qualified nurses manning the phones and more “trained telephone operators”. I am pretty sure that is what they also call those helpful people manning the telecoms and IT helpdesks; the ones who can’t actually answer any question that isn’t on the cards they’ve been given to read out. These provide precisely the same information as the “frequently asked questions” that anyone with half a brain will have read on the website before picking up the phone.

The only value I have found in these services is the entertainment of asking a wholly unexpected question such as “What’s the weather like in Bangalore, then?” and listening to the frantic shuffling of paper at the other end.

Apart from cost, NHS Direct apparently has to go because GPs don’t like it. The Government’s Big Idea is that GPs are the linchpin of the NHS and should basically run everything. Well, Coco the Clown may well be the linchpin of the circus, but that does not mean we should take his advice on how to erect the big top.

And have you actually tried getting to see an NHS GP lately? Once upon a time I had a doctor who knew me and my medical history; now I see a different locum every time I go to the surgery, and usually have to wait a day or more to do that.

My practice has gone down the route of allowing appointments to be booked online, weeks in advance, so that every slot with one of the partners is filled by forward-thinking repeat visitors, rather than patients with chaotically unplanned illnesses.

Many friends face the alternative madness of the 8.30a.m. telephone roulette, with the phone on permanent redial, because appointments can only be booked on the same day.

House calls? You must be joking. My sick neighbour waited most of a day for the out-of-hours service to chauffeur a mainly German-speaking locum all the way from Penrith.

I don’t blame GPs. If someone had offered me a vast pay rise to work 9-5 Monday-Friday instead of being on call 24/7, I would have grabbed it, too. But unless we can recapture something of the spirit of my parents’ Dr Gilchrist from the 1950s, prepared to turn out at all hours and in all weathers to take a look at a sickly child, I would urge the Government to think long and hard before flicking the “off” switch on NHS Direct.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.