The View from the West

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Why is the service so lousy?

By: Ryan Kinrade

2/04/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 1

Apparently we live in an age that is highly service-oriented. The majority of us now work in service-based industries, and they are often touted as the keystone to our future prosperity.

But if service is so important to our economy, why do we continue to invent more and more ways to do a lousy job of it?

A prime example of modern service gone awry is the automation of telephones. Trying to find a human being at the end of a phone line in today's world is a lot like peeling an onion.

Cutting through many pungent layers of prompts, crying more with each successive sub-menu option, one finally gets the opportunity to leave a voice-mail for a living soul who promises to call back at his or her earliest convenience.

At one time this obstructionist process we know today as "voice-mail hell" was practised almost exclusively by government agencies -- businesses realized that angry customers were more likely to spend or invest their money elsewhere, but the government had no such constraints.

For instance, people who needed to obtain information from Human Resources Development Canada (now paradoxically renamed Service Canada) were instantly bounced to an automated line and subjected to unbearable renditions of contemporary music before a representative was made available. The main intention of this seems to have been to frustrate petitioners and wear down their will.

And it did. People became so used to such treatment that businesses began to depersonalize their operations too. The newly installed robot receptionists caused some amount of tension, but eventually a soothing generic phrase was developed to counter frayed nerves. The meditative mantra: "Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us and will be answered in rotation..." was randomly dubbed into the bland continuum of nauseating Muzak, thus adding another layer of annoyance to an already exasperating experience.

Of course the only thing more irritating than being forced to listen to soft rock is the constant interruption of a computerized voice urging patience, which is why a labyrinth of menu options was imposed on the already agonized caller. Successful navigation required callers to pay very strict attention to a torturous set of ambiguous prompts and respond to them using the keypad. Unfortunately, the keypad on most modern phones resides on the handset, and the handset was almost always glued firmly to the ear so as to not miss an option and have to repeat the whole menu from scratch.

In the early years of this not-so-merry-go-round system one could simply punch in zero at any point to be directed to the queue for a customer service representative. This still necessitated listening to Richard Clayderman reinterpret the hits of Coldplay, but at least the need to "listen closely to the following options" was avoided.

Lately, though, information technology wizards have taken to burying this easy exit in a sub-menu. If you want to skip through the prompts and marketing messages they insist on inserting, you'll have to be savvy enough to guess which combination of keys will lead you to a voice mail or, if you are very lucky, a service agent with a clue.

I'm not against self-service, in part because I know I'm likely going to enjoy my next root canal more than a call to any organization that employs a computerized telecommunications strategy. What annoys me to no end is that our service industry seems to be building a wall of technology to protect itself from our urgent and/or easily answered inquiries and offering us more bureaucracy when what we really crave is just a little bit of simplicity.

Ryan Kinrade is a Winnipeg writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 2, 2009 A10

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