Computer systems are being used to snub you more effectively, depending on your value to the company you're calling.
This is how it works. In the customer record is a field that rates your importance, based on your spending power. If you have deep pockets, you may merit a "1", marking you as a first-class customer whose calls should be answered pronto by a senior customer service agent.
The same field, in the record of a poor customer, might contain a "3", which tells the system to treat you like a third-class customer (or "pond life", as one IT executive has described non-priority customers). The system will put you to the back of the queue. If you eventually get through, your call will be routed to the cheapest call centre.
"It's all about finding out who the customer is and putting them in the correct bucket," explains Ian Davis, director of product strategy for customer experience management company ATG.
Companies need to screen out the least valuable customers, explains Davis. "The unprofitable customers never hear about the discounts or the promotions."
This is the new power of databases: a subtle means of reinforcing a financially-based class system. It's part of an umbrella of systems generally called "technology for marketing".
Henrik Mandal, from a company called Responsewave, explains how his invention can be used to target prospects. "There's a range of ways we can get to the customer. If we don't get them on the phone, we can text them. If that doesn't get through, we can fax them. If that's not working, we can get them face to face."
Critics of technology always seem to imagine that a new world order is being created. That's mistaken, Mandal points out. "Technology only really takes the processes we have in place and makes them more efficient," he says.
This even applies to the class system, apparently. The process of discrimination has been subtly refined and fine-tuned over centuries. The only real difference that IT has made to the class system is to automate the instant judgments.
This is achieved through customer relationship management (CRM) systems, the databases of customer information that companies exploit to "cross-sell" or "up-sell". It's 10 times cheaper to sell to existing customers than it is to find new ones, according to market analysts at Gartner. That's why the "reward" for buying from some companies is often to suffer unsolicited follow-up calls.
What happened to the democratising effect of e-commerce? Isn't this an automated class system? "Yes, but it's important to companies to get the profitable customers," explains Chris Parson, marketing director at Teradata, a data warehousing company.
In the IT industry, this segmentation process is called "class of service". "Your best customers get the best service," explains Greg Anderson, product marketing director at Frontrange, which makes Goldmine, a popular CRM system.
Meanwhile, the advocates of aggressive marketing techniques have opened up a new front. Mobile phones are the latest key.
"Your mobile is the closest we get to your personal space," explains a Vodafone PR spokeswoman. "Eighty per cent of all mobile messages are opened and read."
