Call centre clones… or robots
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The act of calling a call centre could fall into several hypothetical templates. There's the one where you're on hold for an hour, then get through to the wrong place and have to call back. There's the one where you're on hold for an hour then end up having a conversation that lasts about a minute. There's the one where you get through more or less straight through but speak to someone with the brain capacity of a dehydrated amoeba and wish you hadn't called. And there's the one where you get through and get what you want.
Depending on who you’re calling, the latter can be a rare and delightful treat. Sometimes it's easier to achieve the results you would like than at others. But in my experience, regardless of the outcome, there are elements of the experience itself that seem infinitely more predictable.
Call centres seem to use templates for everything. If you're calling a support line, for example, it's not unreasonable to expect to speak to someone checking a knowledge base to see if your question has a precedent and, as such, an answer that doesn't require them to dedicate any more thought to it. If you're calling a sales line, you can expect to be lead through a minefield of offers, upgrades and accessories designed to relieve you of some of that pesky money you've had loitering in your account.
What I've noticed is the most predictable element, however, is the person I'm talking to. It appears that there are only a couple of templates for this. One is a rather amiable twenty-something Scottish girl. The other is a man with an accent that doesn’t quite belong with the name 'Steve', but who introduces himself as such anyway. Both are friendly enough and have learnt to give the impression that they're being very helpful for at least as long as you're on the phone.
Despite calling a variety of different call centres for different companies and, thankfully, for different reasons, I almost always seem to get through to one of these templates. It's highly unlikely that all call centre lines redirect to a single location. And while the idea of the same two people answering every call would go some way to explaining the wait, I don't think that is a probable scenario either. It is armed with this reasoning, and a penchant for Hollywood action movies, that I have decided call centres are therefore either very skilled at cloning people, or have a very large team of robots.
I should point out one exception. I've recently opened an ISA with Yorkshire Building Society and have found that on the few occasions I have called them, the representative I have spoken to fits neither of the aforementioned templates. Instead, a very broad, northern accent, resplendent with all of its many nuances and affectations, is voiced by a similarly helpful but otherwise ageless (at least by phone) female; the sort one would expect to be friends with your mother and who visits occasionally to share stories that still have the rude bits in them. If call centres did clone people or make robots, this isn't a natural candidate. But in a way, that's a bit of a shame. It would be worth the wait.