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You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/02/customer-service-kafkaesque-companies-bureaucracy-social-media
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| Customer service is becoming more Kafkaesque by the day | Customer service is becoming more Kafkaesque by the day |
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| Anyone who’s seen The Onion’s video “Prague’s Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport”, in which an airline official played by a Slavoj Žižek soundalike tells confused travellers, “If there is a problem, fill out a complaint form, and place it in an envelope addressed to the name of the hospital in which you were born”, will recognise a kernel of truth about customer service buried in the absurdist humour. | |
| Customer service, in its myriad forms, becomes more Kafkaesque by the day. Rounds of Muzak, the endless repeating of your name, address, birth date and maybe some other personal details (a childhood pet, the name of the street you grew up on) leave you, at best, feeling like a grumpy Jack Dee character and, at worst, like you are lost in a labyrinth patrolled by armed guards whose sole function is to shut a series of reinforced steel doors in your face. Anger, frustration, and confusion: these are the emotions that come to mind when I think of settling a mobile phone bill or querying a bank charge. | Customer service, in its myriad forms, becomes more Kafkaesque by the day. Rounds of Muzak, the endless repeating of your name, address, birth date and maybe some other personal details (a childhood pet, the name of the street you grew up on) leave you, at best, feeling like a grumpy Jack Dee character and, at worst, like you are lost in a labyrinth patrolled by armed guards whose sole function is to shut a series of reinforced steel doors in your face. Anger, frustration, and confusion: these are the emotions that come to mind when I think of settling a mobile phone bill or querying a bank charge. |
| In customer service we see the alienation of modern life. We are helpless before the endless rounds of bureaucracy, the many layers of deflection, the call centres located all around the globe. Companies spread their responsibilities and tasks are outsourced so that you never know who you really have to talk to in order to resolve a problem. | In customer service we see the alienation of modern life. We are helpless before the endless rounds of bureaucracy, the many layers of deflection, the call centres located all around the globe. Companies spread their responsibilities and tasks are outsourced so that you never know who you really have to talk to in order to resolve a problem. |
| Private-public partnerships have only exacerbated this problem. For the past 18 months, two local housing providers and an array of building firms have been passing responsibility for the basic but vital work that needs to be done on the house I live in. Each blames the other for the failure to do anything. The people employed to provide customer service are slow and confused. There is no one I can look in the eye and tell: “This is the problem; please do your job and help.”, There can’t be anyone in Britain who doesn’t know this feeling. | Private-public partnerships have only exacerbated this problem. For the past 18 months, two local housing providers and an array of building firms have been passing responsibility for the basic but vital work that needs to be done on the house I live in. Each blames the other for the failure to do anything. The people employed to provide customer service are slow and confused. There is no one I can look in the eye and tell: “This is the problem; please do your job and help.”, There can’t be anyone in Britain who doesn’t know this feeling. |
| A galling recent development is that while these companies aren’t going out of their way to help you, they are spending time developing cute online personas. Centra Group, one of the companies I’ve been sent screaming down the Kafka path by, just asked the poet Michael Rosen to re-tweet something for them. Social media accounts, a spinoff of customer service, are used to whitewash reputations: that big oil company desecrating the Niger Delta? Oh they’re not so bad, they just tweeted a link to Grumpy Cat. This is the unbearably twee new world of customer service as branding exercise. It’s the world in which multinational corporations make pastry-related puns, have “conversations” with each other online and then have those conversations breathlessly covered by BuzzFeed as if they were actual conversations and not just carefully managed branding exercises carried out by social media managers. | A galling recent development is that while these companies aren’t going out of their way to help you, they are spending time developing cute online personas. Centra Group, one of the companies I’ve been sent screaming down the Kafka path by, just asked the poet Michael Rosen to re-tweet something for them. Social media accounts, a spinoff of customer service, are used to whitewash reputations: that big oil company desecrating the Niger Delta? Oh they’re not so bad, they just tweeted a link to Grumpy Cat. This is the unbearably twee new world of customer service as branding exercise. It’s the world in which multinational corporations make pastry-related puns, have “conversations” with each other online and then have those conversations breathlessly covered by BuzzFeed as if they were actual conversations and not just carefully managed branding exercises carried out by social media managers. |
| It’s the post-Innocent smoothies world in which companies trying to turn a healthy profit feel the need to use words like “Yay” and “OMG” to show that they’re just like us. But they’re not just like us and you don’t have to be a Marxist to be suspicious of corporations and how they operate. The only upside to this cutesy take on customer service is that, asshown in this series of conversations, you can easily take advantage of the need for corporate chat troubleshooters to get positive customer feedback (itself a kind of tyranny) by asking them ridiculous questions that they then have to answer. It’s a fun diversion but it’s not going to help if you have anything you actually need sorting out. | It’s the post-Innocent smoothies world in which companies trying to turn a healthy profit feel the need to use words like “Yay” and “OMG” to show that they’re just like us. But they’re not just like us and you don’t have to be a Marxist to be suspicious of corporations and how they operate. The only upside to this cutesy take on customer service is that, asshown in this series of conversations, you can easily take advantage of the need for corporate chat troubleshooters to get positive customer feedback (itself a kind of tyranny) by asking them ridiculous questions that they then have to answer. It’s a fun diversion but it’s not going to help if you have anything you actually need sorting out. |
| But the poor people working at the sharp end of customer service – the workers manning the phones the world over – aren’t the ones that deserve our ire. They aren’t the ones in control and they’re certainly not the ones benefiting financially. Ukip would have you believe that it is the working class immigrant population in this country that is responsible for an array of problems from unemployment to the housing crisis to the loss of cultural identity. Blaming customer service workers is based on the same flawed and divisive logic. | But the poor people working at the sharp end of customer service – the workers manning the phones the world over – aren’t the ones that deserve our ire. They aren’t the ones in control and they’re certainly not the ones benefiting financially. Ukip would have you believe that it is the working class immigrant population in this country that is responsible for an array of problems from unemployment to the housing crisis to the loss of cultural identity. Blaming customer service workers is based on the same flawed and divisive logic. |
| The people manning the phones or the online chat box programmes need to work, and this is the work that is available. While there’s nothing more frustrating and potentially sinister than the old “I’m just doing my job” line, the call centre worker you want to scream at is just a first line of defence – one who, because of global capital, is probably sitting thousands of miles from you. Getting angry with this person will only exacerbate the impotence you already feel. But then perhaps that’s one of the defining experiences of being British right now. We’re angry. We just don’t know where or how to direct that anger. | The people manning the phones or the online chat box programmes need to work, and this is the work that is available. While there’s nothing more frustrating and potentially sinister than the old “I’m just doing my job” line, the call centre worker you want to scream at is just a first line of defence – one who, because of global capital, is probably sitting thousands of miles from you. Getting angry with this person will only exacerbate the impotence you already feel. But then perhaps that’s one of the defining experiences of being British right now. We’re angry. We just don’t know where or how to direct that anger. |
| This article was commissioned after a suggestion from hvadaltsaa | This article was commissioned after a suggestion from hvadaltsaa |
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