De-skilling the human

I was thinking about why it is that life in call centre society is so frustrating. It occurred to me that aside from the endless time spent listening to dreadful hold music, it's because it's rare that speaking to anyone actually resolves the situation.

Those working in call centres frequently follow dreadful scripts, or are constrained by endless policies that prevent them from actually having to assess and respond to the situation they are dealing with. Even when they sympathise with your situation and want to do something about it, policies, procedures and systems often mean they can't.

What used to be simple and efficient transactions in which humans spoke to each other and between them (usually) managed to come to some mutually satisfactory resolution now have totally different dynamics - the individual pitted against the monolithic set of policies and systems. And even when the policies and systems are patently at fault, or have failed to account for a particular situation, or are simply unreasonable, the onus is now on individuals to try to mount an assault that will give them fair treatment. Anyone who's tried to mount the endless layers of (so-called) customer service to achieve this will know how resolute one has to be and how painful the process is.

The worst thing about this trend is de-skilling of individuals representing companies. Instead of being trained and trusted to act in their employers' best interests and to make judgements appropriately, their working processes are based on the opposite: an assumption that they can't be trusted to make good decisions or act in their employers' best interests. The experience for the consumer is concomitantly worsened - this is a company that clearly doesn't trust its representatives to do a satisfactory job. How encouraging.

As systems become more sophisticated and better connected to other systems and sources of data, I suspect that this situation will only get worse.