I rang a company’s call centre the other day, and the experience was exemplary: helpful, knowledgeable, charming. The firm was a client of ours, so I asked what they did to make their telephone operators so unbelievably good. ‘Um, to be perfectly honest, we probably overpay them.’
Their call centre was 20 miles from a large city. Staff didn’t have to travel for an hour each day to find reasonably paid work, so they stayed for decades and became highly proficient. Training and recruitment costs were negligible. And it wasn’t just me they impressed: customer satisfaction was astoundingly high. The staff weren’t really a ‘cost’ — they were a significant reason for the company’s success.
Alas, modern capitalism dictates that it will only be a matter of time before some beady-eyed consultants notice that a few employees are still enjoying pleasant jobs and reasonable wages and so pitch up at a board meeting with a PowerPoint deck entitled ‘Rightsizing customer service costs through offshoring and resource management’ or similar £250-an-hour MBA ejaculate.
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