You call this 'best practice'?

[fedsron2us]

Sunday June 5, 2005
The Observer

The lengths to which companies will go to avoid drawing the right conclusions in favour of the self-serving and expedient never ceases to amaze. A spectacular - and sad - example was highlighted in an article in this paper last week ('Indian call staff quit over abuse on the line'), describing how increasing numbers of employees were abandoning their jobs because of abuse, often racist, from British and US customers.

<snip>

There is zero excuse or tolerance for the kind of abuse documented in the article. But to blame the anger on racism and the effects of offshoring is to ignore the glaring fact that belligerent customers are a major stress factor for UK and US call centres, too. Does that cause a dim light to go on somewhere? It should. The important thing is nothing to do with where the call centre is located; the important thing is that customers have had it up to here, everywhere, and the reasons are everywhere the same.

At bottom, companies are still producing to suit themselves rather than the customer. 'We don't care about the colour of the person we're talking to,' says Professor Harry Scarbrough, director of the Economic and Social Research Council's Evolution of Business Knowledge programme. 'But we do care about being fobbed off with people working to a script. Call centres don't have the knowledge available in a local bank branch or shop. What customers get is knowledge that is pre-packed, shallow, mass-produced and inflexible. People don't like that.'

It was Albert Einstein who defined madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Tragically, but predictably, this is what is happening in India and elsewhere as supposedly advanced companies export toxic western management techniques to countries that can be excused for imagining that there is no alternative to what they are told is 'best practice'. 'Best practice', of course (like 'solutions'), is rapidly becoming a warning sign of meaninglessness or complacency ahead. And in the case of contact centres, charges John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting, conventional 'best practice' is a large part of the problem, embedding in the work the very things that earned centres their sweatshop reputation and harming competitiveness rather than improving it.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1499306,00.html

I do not know why he is so surprised. In the modern western corporation CEOs only worry about the size of their pay check. The customer, the employee and even the shareholders count for nothing.

[punpirate]

1. It's no surprise, really...

... given that it's a problem magnified by mistake.

Software and hardware call centers do have to entertain a steady stream of idiots--but, that's because they marketed their products to idiots (M$oft being the principal offender here). Even with product manuals available, the average call center advice-giver has no clue about the intimate details of every product for which he's expected to offer advice (many centers just have huge jukeboxes of CDs and take contracts from hundreds of small manufacturers).

The rule of thumb for many years has been that a company has to spend about 1% of gross on publications, and 1% of gross on service, to maintain adequate customer base. They are areas which don't have direct costs related to production and are seen as drags on profits. Attempts to reduce those costs invariably result in unhappy customers.

Customer service in the modern world, courtesy of MBAs with little experience with irate people....