Pathfinders – ‘Bear with me a moment…’

Here is an everyday story you will be all-too familiar with, the attempt to resolve a problem via a call centre. You navigate a complex phone menu, whose options don’t match your actual problem. You wait for a human representative while forced to listen to lift music or worse, banging club anthems on a loop. A human at last responds and a pause ensues as you turn the volume back up in a panic that the human might ring off. You explain your problem, but naturally you are talking to the wrong department and need to be transferred. You are put back onto the banging club anthems – clearly selected to make your day happier and brighter – until eventually another human speaks, and you patiently begin to explain the problem again from the start. The human operator is sympathetic, and proposes to investigate the problem for you. In order to do this, you must be returned to the banging club anthems. This continues for twenty minutes and then… you are disconnected.

This is only the beginning. Like the 2014 film Edge of Tomorrow, whose strapline is ‘Live. Die. Repeat’, you start again from zero. Over and over. But you get smarter. You can predict what’s going to happen. Now you beg the operator ‘Please please, don’t put me on hold, because I keep being disconnected.’ But the operator is unable to proceed with any investigation while you’re still on the line. Two simultaneous phone calls are somehow beyond modern call-centre technology. It’s back to the bangin’ tunes.

What started as a simple technical problem now metastasises into existential angst. You feel like you’re shouting into a void, set adrift in a boundless universe of anonymous amnesia. If you’re not literally shouting at the disembodied operator by now, it’s only due to your steely self-control and determination not to offload your stress and frustration onto a fellow worker.

Though it seems impossible that a solution can ever emerge from this Dantesque corporate inferno, one is arrived at, and a call-out visit arranged. The visit does not materialise. Back into the club-anthems universe you go. It seems all the call-outs were cancelled, with no explanation available. They’re very sorry about that, something must have gone wrong at their end. But they can offer an appointment later next week?

This story, or something like it, is well known to everyone. But it has another side, which you won’t know unless you’ve been one of the 800,000 people who actually work in a call centre. At the other end of the line, your anonymous script-reciting operator is going through their own version of emotional torture.

It is hard to think of any type of work that’s more stressful, frustrating, dispiriting and disempowering than being a call-centre worker. You probably got the job via an agency, because you were desperate, an agency which you know for a fact gets paid for your work at double the rate the agency pays you. You arrive on shift to be directed to any one of fifty call desks, given a sheet of permissible responses and actions, and told that your calls are recorded and monitored by a supervisor. Half your calls are customers calling back after they were disconnected. They have no idea who they talked to before, and you have no way of finding out either. So they have to start again from scratch. You can pull up their customer file, but you are not permitted to enter notes on the file for follow-up. You attempt to resolve the problem, though they beg you not to put them on hold, and when you get back to the customer the line has gone dead…

Four hours of this and then a lunch break, where people slump like galley slaves, too drained to talk. Then you start again, trying to sound fresh and helpful. The customers do their best to be polite but are often at the end of their tether. Sometimes you can tell they’re in tears. Your heart goes out to them. You want to help, you really do. And it would be so easy. If you could just assign yourself ‘ownership’ of their case, you could follow it up, even over multiple shifts, and call the customer back when you’d resolved the problem. But the system does not permit such ownership. That would entail responsibility, and with it the leverage to demand a higher wage. You can’t even leave yourself a Post-it note to call back and check on progress, because hot-desking means never getting the same desk twice. Even so, Post-it notes proliferate like blossoms on each computer screen, all scribbled with customer information and bank details, only to be swept away into bin bags by cleaners every night. In the morning the centre is empty of notes. Amnesia is normal operating procedure. If the cleaners were less honest, they could be cleaning out people’s bank accounts, such is the lack of corporate oversight, and bosses’ indifference.

If workers react with hostility to ‘call rage’ or, which is more likely and far worse, agree with the customer that the company is shit, they are sacked on the spot. If they protest to the supervisor, they are sacked on the spot. They are ‘casual’. They don’t get rights. They don’t get a say. They don’t need brains. Staff burnout is massive. Staff turnover is massive. Nobody stands this work for long.

The companies don’t need to treat call-centre workers and customers this badly, of course. It’s all by design. It’s ‘cost-effective’, which means more profits. Capitalist customer service, turbocharged with digital automation, hollows the life out of human communication and replaces it with impotent frustration for both parties. 83 percent of UK call-centre workers report negative mental health effects.

There’s nothing special about this story. It’s not big or newsworthy. It’s mundane, everyday, just one among a million trivial, undramatic tales of humdrum humiliation in capitalism.

No wonder people riot.

PJS

Next article: Some questions – and answers ⮞