Time to bypass the call centres and use the internet

The only cases where call centres make sense are where complicated advice is needed or when pushy selling is required.

I PUNCHED in a London number and far away in Singapore the phone rang twice.

"This is Bloomberg, the home of customer service, innovation and creativity," said a recorded voice. "Please stand by and listen to one of our seven global television channels whilst we find you a service genius."

So I stood by and after a few more rings a service genius picked up the phone. "Bloomberg, this is Mark. How may I help you?"

"Hello, Mark," I said. "Do you mind if I ask how you feel about being called a service genius?"

There was a pause.

"I'm sorry?" he said.

I explained about the recorded message.

"Are you asking me?"

I confirmed that I was. And he had a little think and said:

"I suppose I feel neutral about it."

He thought some more and offered this theory: "It is our job to address customers' queries to the best of our abilities."

Mark is a genius after all. He has stumbled on a truth that most people who run call centres, including his own employers, have forgotten. For all the hubris, oxymorons and utter twaddle of its recorded message, Bloomberg hasn't noticed that the point of employing people at the end of phones is to supply good answers to the people who ring in.

Doing this, however, seems to be unbelievably difficult.

Last week I watched Phone Rage, a Channel 4 documentary about call centres. It is mass warfare out there: frustrated, shouty customers pitched against young people in headphones earning meagre salaries and mostly failing to keep the boredom from their voices.

"F***ing British Telecom!" yells one angry customer. "I pay my f***ing bills so get off my f***ing line!!"

"I can empathise with you, sir," a pallid young employee says blankly.

Behind the scenes companies go on making the same elementary mistakes: not having enough people to answer the telephones, giving them dumb scripts to read from, employing people whose English is difficult to understand and repeatedly telling customers who are kept on hold that "your call is important to us".

There has to be a better way - and there is. The documentary showed us the famously good First Direct call centre in Leeds, where happy staff lark around throwing softballs at each other while they shower customers with warm words like "need", "want", "like" and "love". When callers have managed to supply three letters or numbers from their password, they are taught to say: "That's tremendous!"

As a loyal First Direct customer I can confirm that my calls are answered promptly, that staff are friendly and that I am always warmly congratulated every time I remember my memorable address.

Yet I have found a still better solution to the call centre problem: bypass them and use the internet instead. According to the documentary, we each spend a day a year talking to call centres. This is a mad waste of time. All call centre staff do is input data into computers and so it makes every sense to cut out the weary middleman and type in the stuff yourself.

This means you never get put on hold. You are never told the 13 most annoying words in the English language: "Please listen carefully to all the following options before making a selection." Instead you can click on a few options as carelessly as you like with no one bossing you about and get your answer faster.

Most beautifully, you don't have to talk to another person, which is stressful, invasive and not to be recommended. Talking to friends on the phone is nice but talking to people in call centres, no matter how cheery and upbeat their tone of voice, is not.

The only cases where call centres make sense are where complicated advice is needed, or when pushy selling is required - as service geniuses can be better than machines at getting us to part with our money. But otherwise, the telephone is increasingly unfit not just for call centres but for most other business purposes too.

When you talk to a stranger on the phone, you can't see them but you have to talk to them nicely. It is both intimate and alienating at the same time, which is a freaky combination. When I was a news reporter I found calling people traumatic, and still have to psych myself up before picking up the phone even to make a dental appointment.

By comparison, e-mail is quick and easy and appropriately impersonal. It is much derided for interrupting our work, but its interruptions are as nothing against the noisy, intrusive, brutal telephone.

As I write this, perfectly on cue, my phone rings and it is someone I barely know wanting to "pick my brains" on something. How dare you interrupt me, I thought. My rage was made worse by the new telephone I've been given that has a clock on it, so I can see just how long the call is taking. I spent two minutes 43 seconds on that unwanted call. An e-mail would have taken about 10 seconds. The man would have written: "Do you know anything about X?" I would have e-mailed back: "No".

Increasingly, though, my phone is silent, which might be because I am so bad with the people who do ring. However, I'm not taking it personally: I think it is because other people agree with me that the phone is becoming obsolete at work. Most mornings I get in and I have no phone messages at all, which is tremendous, as the First Direct staff would say. - (Financial Times service)

Most beautifully, you don't have to talk to another person, which is stressful, invasive and not to be recommended