One of the hazards of being social organisms
is that we come to accept certain behaviors as normal and natural, without
thinking about the consequences of such behavior.
Today I’d like to consider to the pervasive
dishonesty of modern times.
In the past two weeks, I’ve spent a fair
amount of time on the phone dealing with “customer support” of various
organizations.
All of them had messages
assuring me that “your call is very important to us.”
Now, in any society with even a middling
regard for the truth, none of those companies would survive a week.
When someone’s call is very important, you
have a human being answer it.
When
someone’s phone call is not important, you have a recording answer it, and put
the caller on hold, as a matter of routine.
And when someone’s call is
something you wish to avoid, you have the recording offer a phone tree; require
the caller to press buttons or enter information that doesn’t help the caller a
bit; persistently urge the caller waiting to talk to a person to hang up; and
finally, if they do stick it out and get to a person, require them to give the
same
information
again (because the system is set up not to pass it on).
As a special insult, the organization will
frequently attempt to sell you something while you’re on hold.
By contrast, here’s an example of how a phone
call from a customer is handled when it is important.
Back in the fifties, iirc, a woman who worked
as a secretary in New York was called into a room where he boss was meeting
some people, and told to look through her purse and find any Revlon cosmetic.
She had a Revlon lipstick.
The boss then told her to call Revlon and
complain the lipstick was defective (smeared, or something).
Her call was very quickly routed to a man who
apologized, and asked for her name and address, so that he could send her a
replacement lipstick.
He then asked her
to read the batch number off of the tube, so that they could check for other
problems with that production run.
After
that, he asked if she’d like to sign up to be a product tester—Revlon would
send her new cosmetics they were considering selling, and postage-paid
envelopes, and she’d test the stuff out and send the company her honest opinion
of it.
(She said yes, and the sample
soon started arriving.) Finally, the man on the phone closed it out by asking
the secretary what she was wearing.
He
then gave her advice on what shade of lipstick would go best with that outfit.
Who was this helpful chap?
Charles Revson, the founder and CEO of
Revlon, already fairly rich, with a reputation for rudeness and bad temper.
The secretary’s boss had been talking to some
businessmen, bankers iirc, who complained it was hard to get Revson on the
phone.
The boss had her make the call to
demonstrate that it was easy to get hold of Revson, when Revson thought your
call was important.
Closely related to the routine lies about customer service over the phone
are the web pages that promise ‘help.’ There’s always a bunch of “frequently
asked questions”, links to various pages where you could handle various things
on your own (cheaply for the company, in other words), and
usually,
but not always, a link to some way of getting in touch with a person.
That link is invariably small and hard to
find, if it's there.
If you’re real
lucky, it will take you directly to the means of contact, phone or e-mail or
live chat.
(Personally, I prefer live
chat; I can’t give in to the temptation to scream at the person I’m dealing
with.
Having done customer service over
the phone, I know they’re usually trying their best, within the limits their
company will allow.) More usually, it will start you on a quest through to or
three more web pages
An honest phone answering message from one of
our modern organizations would begin with something like.
“Hello.
You’ve reached this recording because your call is not important to us,
and we don’t want to pay someone to talk to you.” An honest web page would be
headed “Information we hope will keep us from having to deal with you.” It
would be interesting to see the public’s reaction to such a message (I’d find
it a relief), but consider our reaction to the way we’re treated now.
Is your
routine reaction ‘These
people are liars.
I’d better be careful,
they
will try to cheat me’?
More
likely, you don't even notice.
But perhaps the most important thing about these whoppers is the fact that
the organizations that lie so routinely don’t think of themselves as liars, at
least as far as I can tell.
Perhaps I’m
wrong, but I get the opinion they
think they’re trying to provide good
service, as they do their best to avoid providing any at all.
The culture of dishonesty has so affected
them that the liars don’t know when they’re lying.
I believe this has profound consequences for
society.
I’ll write more about this in
future posts.