The System

It has been a while since I made my last post but I have just been a bit lazy. So apologies to any readers that follow my meanderings. I'll try to do better in future, as Warren Buffet says after he's made a bit of a horlicks about something -- not that he makes many of those.  Witness just today when he exercised his Bank of America options and made $12 billion!  He deserves the afternoon off on a day like that.

But this post isn't about any of that, it is about the mindlessness of how business has become when it touches the small person, that is you and I, or in tech speak 'the user'.  Time was (and I know I sound like my parents now but then again I am grey so what do you expect?) when you wanted something like a bank loan, for example, you went into your local branch and asked to see the bank manager. You'd meet him (most likely in those days) and discuss what you needed and he'd make a decision on whether you were a fair risk or not.  Scroll forward to the times of the robo-lenders and there's no human touch involved at all. Just credit scores and a few computer chips with an embedded algorithm that give you an answer in a nano second. It is called 'efficient' and the world is striving for 'efficiency' so that we may increase our 'productivity', another quite innocent word that has taken on horrible connotations in recent times.

Now if you want a loan from a bank you cannot go into a branch and see a manager because there isn't one, a manager that is, and quite often there isn't a branch either. I went into a branch of my bank in England in a city high street and lined up dutifully for a 'customer services assistant' who it turned out could not assist me at all even though I was there in the bank. I had to call their call centre (which I did from a bank of phones from the bank branch) for this type of thing which was in another city (and could have well been in another country for all I know) and speak to another but this time disembodied 'customer service assistant'.  These days I don't bother going into banks but simply make the call to the call centre instead. Its not that it saves much time (it doesn't) rather I just skip the first bit where someone tells me in person that they cannot help and suggest that I speak to someone in the call centre.

Almost always you are met with "Good day, this is XXX customer service centre where your call is very important to us. Unfortunately there are other customers on the phone and the waiting time will be ..." or some such variation. I tried British Airways for some insane reason the day after their recent computer crash and the wait time even at night was a day and a half!  But if you're lucky the line goes click and somebody picks up.

At that point you encounter the first stage which immediately follows the pleasantries which are "How can I help you?" and then immediately jump into the remote identification process which starts off with invariably the same: "what is your date of birth?" and "what is your mother's maiden name?"

So on the one occasion recently that made me write this blog piece (it was a bank but could easily have been a phone company or almost anyone else) upon providing the details, I was met with the answer: "that's wrong". "What do you mean that's wrong?" I said back. "The system says its wrong" comes back the answer.

So there you have it, the 'System' knows everything about everything and everyone and that 'System' knows my date of birth and mother's maiden name... and I don't!  But here's the wrinkle, I have had that account since 1980 or 1981, don't remember which, and that... wait for it... predates computers and goes back to the time of branches and bank managers. At no point in between then and now have they ever asked for my mother's maiden name (they update passport details every so often) so how does it know?

We have a friend who is more nomadic than we are and she is part of the global data entry team that enters masses of data on people for a website that specialises in genealogy. She is provided with reams of paper with various bits of information and simply enters data from that paper into a 'System' and gets paid something for it.  So human interference gets involved right at the beginning.  One thing I remember from my college classes in DP (Data Processing as it was called back in the 1970's!) is garbage in, garbage out. Fat fingers is another way of putting it. Or human error. Not saying it is, not saying it isn't. Just saying.

Going back to my call centre conversation, I realise that its not that person's fault.  All they do is react to prompts provided by 'The System'. They don't know me or my details, they have common sense probably but 'The System' does not. They just respond to queries from 'The System' -- by the way I thought this is what computers should do for us, not the other way around -- and 'The System' asks them random questions for which the first two always seem to be the same. Once through them there are of course many others to choose from as well before you can actually start to do whatever it is you want to do.

In the past month or so I have had many such conversations with call centres on various matters and all of them last an hour or thereabouts. Just this week I tried to close a bank account and went through two call centre levels; the first was the low level person who didn't know a thing and at the first sign of anything complex immediately referred me to someone else who knew a bit more with the upshot being that the lady suggested that I should go into my local branch. Fortunately for this account at least I was in the same place so did just that, met a lovely lady named Ms. Bell and she resolved things in less than 5 minutes leaving me with a warm glow.

Now isn't that what customer service should be?