Efficiency versus the customer

How often has this happened to you? You call an office number. A perky recorded voice greets and welcomes you to the organisation. Then it asks you to dial the required extension number if you know it.

If you don't (which is often the case), you are asked to dial 0 or 9 for the operator. You try the latter option, another urgent voice (mostly in a recorded American accent for some reason) informs you that your call is being transferred to an operator. And then, the phone rings and rings and rings … till you ring off and try again.

And this must have happened to you many times, too. Someone from XYZ Bank or ABC credit card company calls you, urging you to take a loan or get a credit card or buy some new product all at seemingly unbeatable rates. You refuse.

Two days later, a different person from the same bank or credit card company calls you and intones the same request. You refuse and point out that you've done so before and ring off. A week later: same story. And so it goes on.

Both situations are the result of profitability-enhancing technologies that organisations and business process outsourcing outfits implement as a matter of course. These technologies have helped them cut back substantially on manpower costs (you need fewer telephone operators to man the switchboards now) or derive major productivity gains from the same manpower.

One variation of this efficiency-enhancing drive is to leverage IT as a sales marketing tool. Now, it may not irk when an offer comes attached to, say, an email or a website since you have the option to ignore them. It does when you are subjected to a marketing spiel when you dial an office.

One organisation I recently called (long-distance, in Mumbai at that) took time out to inform me about its newest offer plus its website address before it got down to the business of transferring my call to an operator.

If it's a call centre you've called, you can be kept on hold for an age, subject to all manner of sales jingles and offers till a service executive finally answers.

The irony of all of this is that it is customers that tend to become the victims of such corporate efficiency drives. Let me clarify first that this is not a Luddite argument against automation. There is no reason for corporations not to reap the very obvious and substantial gains to be had from IT-related technologies.

Why, after all, should organisations employ a battalion of telephone operators per shift when you can halve the numbers with an automated answering system that requires minimum human intervention? But the question of whether every call actually gets answered as a result is often overlooked altogether.

The logic is certainly sound but then, as Commander Spock famously said in Star Trek, "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end". The wisdom in this case is keeping track of how well it serves the customer, potential or otherwise, or even the employee.

Let's take the mystery of the repeated sales calls. As anybody will testify, they continue unabated despite Supreme Court strictures on unsolicited sales call earlier this year, and they grow more frenzied in frequency as half-yearly targets approach.

The reason for the repeat calls is this marvellous software that an increasing number of call centres use. It enables a centre to dial numbers in bulk from a database (sold by service companies with gay abandon these days) and "intelligently" direct these calls to the first operator who is free.

Thus, if your number is on the database, the chances of your being called several times by the same call centre are high. And that is why he (or she) may not be the same person who called you the first time.

Now, for the call centre, this software is a terrific productivity-building tool. It frees the call centre executive from dialling hundreds of numbers during his shift and allows him to focus on his "core competence", so to speak, of making (or taking) many more calls.

But the upshot of all this is that neither customer nor call centre executive derives much joy from the transaction. Almost everyone I know has developed a visceral aversion to such calls, and blameless call center execs tend to unwittingly be at the receiving end of this irritation.

To return to Spock's (or, at any rate his dialogue writer's) observations about wisdom, surely it makes sense to extend the logic of efficiency and work on software that records a cold call the first time? It is hard to understand why efficiency cannot be synchronised with customer satisfaction. It surely should not be an end in itself.