The most widely acknowledged source of stress-in-modern-life index typically puts death of a spouse or close relative/friend first, followed by redundancy, followed by moving house. I don’t know when this index was compiled but I would guess that if done now, moving house would leap to the top spot. Not because of the usual hassle with the mortgage, the new owners of your house, the old owners of your new house, packing, and dealing with recalcitrant teenagers who never wanted to leave their friends.
No, the proverbial straw draped across the camel’s back is the suicide-inducing chore of disconnecting your domestic technology and re-connecting it at your new address. It was bad enough when it was just a simple telephone. But the dreaded bundled package multiplies the problems beyond endurance if you don’t have a resident teenage boy to oversee the process.
A recent article by Peter Beaumont in the Observer spelt out in detail what the essential dishonesty of the call centre culture has done to our common humanity. It was a very thoughtful piece that reflects the sheer hell of dealing with the hydra-headed monster that supplies your telephone and television (his bête noir is BT, mine is TalkTalk – who have the chutzpah to actually print on their envelopes: Your bill. Don’t worry, it’s TalkTalk).
The irony, of course, as Beaumont points out, is that automated customer service was originally sold as a consumer benefit: the notion that people were so busy they would welcome an automated relationship. But the extent to which the myriad of automated menus, incomprehensible Indian, African, Glasgow and Belfast accents pretending a phoney intimacy handcuffed to rigid scripts and false local knowledge, the merry-go-round of lost connections and failed call back promises has expanded beyond human endurance. That this could ever be considered ‘customer service’ is fatuous.
Which brings me to a theme I’ve written about before, which is the disconnect between what marketing should theoretically be responsible for – how the customer interacts with the brand and how brand equity is built up through positive feed-back loops. How can this possibly function constructively when the whole debilitating call centre culture exists in a parallel universe eons away from what marketing mainly does: commission charming, expensive, indeed popular advertising. The general principle behind advertising is that it should reflect the brand, not apologise and compensate for it.
Plusnet seems to have got on to this, although I’m slightly baffled as to whether I should take the YouTube amateurishness of the advertising as proof of real people behind the brand or as a huge spoof on the slickness of the advertising of the big boys. Am I being asked to buy sausages or telephones? In any case, if my TalkTalk contract ever runs out (I feel they will find a cunning way to extend it forever), I’ll check them out – providing they haven’t been eaten by someone who finds that call centres outside the UK and contracts really are a good idea after all.