I want to speak to a person

The person that actually fixes a broken window or a leak or whatever has a problem if people keep phoning to check progress on their job. S/he will never get anything done. To ameliorate this problem there will be someone who answers the phone/emails etc to prevent the tradesperson from having to do so. 

But this someone has annual leave and maybe sick leave and there's not enough work to take on two people. In a large enough organisation resources can be pooled so there can be an admin team who can between them cover the necessary hours. However they will all need to be able to access up-to-date information about the actual work so that they can tell the customers.

It is fairly easy to see how this scales up to a contact centre, where all calls and emails are answered and all updates to actual jobs are available. And once you have a mega database of people and jobs, it is a small step to let the customers add details of jobs directly.

But what then happens is that you get people who wish to bypass the call centre and speak to an actual person close to the job. Full circle.

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