Call centres

One irritating feature of life as a retired person is the regular intrusions of calls, often of a subcontinental flavour, offering some improbable service. Calls which have caused us to abandon a lifetime of telephonic politeness and to put the phone down without any speech or ceremony at all. One only hopes that the poor sods who have to do this sort of work are used to it and don't take it too personally.

But there is an up side. The same sort of factories which make the calls to potential customers also process the emails from actual and potential customers. And the processes work; on the whole one gets replies in fairly short order.

So a couple of days ago, I had little enough to do that I found the time to send an email to our local council. To which I got a perfectly sensible reply within a few hours.

Then a few weeks ago I had occasion to email a company selling gas fires about ventilation. I got a reply more or less immediately telling me that my email was very important to them and that they would reply, business (in the sense of being busy) permitting withing three working days. I got the substantive, quite satisfactory reply, a few hours later. And while one might smirk at the 'email is very important to us' bit, the instant reply does serve to confirm that your email is in their system and does provide a reference number should it subsequently go missing. The processes do work.

And at about the same time, I had been so impressed by the freshness & niceness of an entirely out of season apple from Sainsbury's that I emailed them to say so and to ask them how they did it. As with the gas fire people, a more or less instant reply to say that they had got my email. Rather more gushing about how important I was to them. Then two days later the substantive reply, which went to far as to admit that they sometimes sourced their apples from South Africa and yes they were probably moved in climate controlled conditions. But they did not go so far as to explain how exactly the trick was done; how they could deliver apples from the other end of the world which tasted to me as if they had been freshly picked. I suppose I fail on two counts. First I not so important to them, gushing notwithstanding, that they were going to spend serious time on answering the question. Second, they might regard the details of exactly how they achieved this miracle of food science as commercially sensitive, not things to be dished out to all comers over the ether. So I can't really complain. But the applies were good and I remain curious about how they do it.

I might add in passing, that they do a similar thing with apples at Tesco's. But in their case the fresh effect wears off much faster once you get the things home. Good the same day, not so good the next.

PS: it took a Clockwise Horton to come up with Toller's law of call centres, which states: "the helpfulness of the person generated substantive reply is inversely proportional to the the gushingness of the computer generated holding reply".