Sarah Harte: Useless automated systems make every transaction a struggle

Even if you get through to a human being, assuming you have the time to wait, customer support representatives based in a call centre often read from a prepared script. Usually, English isn’t their first language, and why should it be?

However, it’s a lose-lose situation if a customer representative answers none of your questions and then finally asks if there's anything else they can help you with today. 

Meanwhile, you hang up, feeling like Michael Douglas’s character in the 90s' movie Falling Down. You recall, an ordinary man, frustrated by the flaws in society, snaps and psychotically lashes out.

In the last week, I found myself in the wasteland of automated telephone hell for two different reasons.

In one case, I spent 24 minutes and 52 seconds on to Bank of Ireland with a potential credit fraud query, with a bulk of that time waiting. You know how it goes: “We apologise for the delay, please continue to hold, and we will be with you shortly”. Yeah, right. Then there’s the "please listen carefully, as our menu options may have changed". There are two problems with this.

We don’t walk around having memorised your menu options, so any changes to your menu won't be a surprise. Additionally, you must listen to extensive data protection notices and notices about recording calls for training purposes before being awarded the privilege of being allowed to select from a blizzard of menu options.

Invariably, this leads to other menu options before you reach a human. If you mistakenly hit the wrong number, you are bludgeoned over the head by the message: “You have made an invalid selection.” The call ends, you grind your teeth, and start again.

In the end, I got Raghav, who was polite and helpful. He consulted with colleagues in another unit and returned with a woefully inadequate answer. I tersely but politely requested that he return to his colleagues and inform them in no uncertain terms that their explanation didn’t suffice, and to please revert with a credible response to the question posed. 

The challenge on these occasions is not to be curt. Can you imagine the stress and burnout in these frontline jobs?

Eventually, I got a reasonable answer. However, it took time and bloody-mindedness. I was ready to die on this hill because I am middle-aged. That’s what middle-aged characters do. It’s why the young and the aged avoid us. We grind the joy out of life.

Raghav did say I could lodge a complaint. Thanks, but I don't have the time, Raghav. I ended the call musing what the experience would have been like for a much older customer. The answer is not good.

Banks never had a soul, but they did at one point perform human functions. Now, their insatiable greed means they must earn the maximum amount of money while providing minimal service and almost zero human interaction. 

We have given them too much power. I would attach conditions to their banking licences requiring them to provide a certain level of service within the community. On the upside, at least Bank of Ireland’s musak is reasonable. 

The same cannot be said for computer company Lenovo’s music, which is profoundly dehumanising and sounds like it could only be AI-generated. An earful of this led to nihilistic existential thoughts about the point of being alive. As bad luck would have it, on the same day I had to run the gauntlet of getting through to BoI, I had to make a second call to Lenovo, whose call centre is based in Poland.

There were several facets to this character-testing process. First, figuring out how to get through. I had to jump through hoops before finally reaching a human.

To say trying to buy the Lenovo product was a saga is an understatement. We had a lengthy, blackly funny exchange (I wasn’t laughing on the day), which took considerable time, in part due to its system being what she described as "slow to open". Somewhat ironic given they are a computer company (FYI Lenovo, it doesn’t inspire confidence), although I was clearly onto a call centre. Meanwhile, more of my valuable working time was ticking away.

We had to create a Lenovo contact ID, a time-consuming process if ever there was one. This required me to furnish my eircode. She said it didn’t exist. I put my foot down and said it did. It took time for her to find it. I then had to spell out many personal details while using the Nato alphabet, which is commonly used by the American military, particularly in radio transmissions. She insisted on it. You know the one: A for Alpha, T for Tango, F for Foxtrot, and R for Romeo.

Several times, I spelled out my lengthy email address following correct Nato procedure because she didn't catch one or two letters, and we were compelled to start de novo. It now felt like I was in a Fellini farce. 

Questions I asked about the product I was buying, including who would specifically service my computer and where they would be based (in Cork, Dublin, Europe, or the Universe), led to vague answers that made me baulk. Also, I had to get back to work and earn my living. I concluded I needed the warranty, but I’d take my chances.

I suppose the commercial point of this that companies need to absorb is that they can lose sales and customers by making the process too complicated and soul-defeating. When customers feel heard, they are more likely to return.

There is also an ethical dimension. How do you cope with these shenanigans if you are older or more vulnerable? The short answer is that you don’t. Your problem remains unresolved. Stressed and humiliated, you don’t know where to turn for help. You doubt yourself (the last thing you need) and feel outside the swim of life.

Somebody I know related how hard it was after her mother died. She spent a lot of time trying to help her father, who was totally analogue. This included visiting phone shops trying to sort out his new smartphone, and even the people working in the shops could only do things online because they had nobody to call either. 

As she said, a large element of this problem is that most large companies outsource parts of their business to other companies, so instead of being able to connect with a colleague to collaborate and help the customer, the customer representative is themselves put through to a separate call centre. 

If you consider the number of different inputs to everything now — different software packages and hardware and apps and websites and payment systems — there might be an endless chain of call centre employees phoning each other, all culminating at the same answering machine in an empty warehouse, somewhere on a ring road in the fourth circle of hell. 

I’m curious. When you consider the time spent by both the customer and the company’s employees jumping through all these hoops, can it be efficient? At what cost to the economy are these automated bottlenecks, and what economic cost does the company incur from dwindling customer loyalty?

Even if this capitalism gone wild is efficient, the human cost, especially for older people, of this complete desertion of customer service, is horrible. When it comes to participating in everyday tasks, or "life admin", as it's now known, the older generation is essentially roadkill.