Reality call

Not so very long ago we used to deal with people face-to-face. You know, we talked. Now we're encouraged by virtually all market sectors to do everything ourselves, usually on the internet. Supermarkets now expect us to do our own bar-coded check-outs. The doorstep conversation with the 'Man from the Pru' when we needed insurance has been replaced by moneysupermatket.com. Now we 'talk' to our computer. We complete an on-line form or contact a call centre. We don't do our shopping at the local shops - or even have a fleeting conversation with the check-out person; we order our stuff over the internet for delivery by yet more vans cluttering our roads and there's no need to speak to anybody. We don't speak to people on the telephone, we text them.

And how efficient is that? Texts are hugely profitable for the Service Providers but lousy for those who need to practice their spelling or who invent abbreviations. And we still don't need to talk.

And banking? Well for years, they've been encouraging us to use the internet too. Why? It's greed and avarice.

For aeons they've known that if they can persuade customers to use internet or telephone banking, they can close down their expensive-to-operate High Street branches manned by people costing them salaries, sickies, holidays, pensions and National Insurance. And when local people crisicise them for closing a branch, the banks have the temerity to blame their customers for preferring to use internet banking!

And what replaces the High Street branches? A few internet programmers and a few call centres based, not in expensive suburban or city-centre streets, but in the sometime squalid outlying industrial wastelands whose inhabitants enjoy the highest levels of mass unemployment.

Out of work people desperate to do any job for a paltry subsistence wage is the aftermath of shutting down our coal-mines, steel-works and shipyards. That's why so many call centres are located in South Wales, Merseyside, Belfast, Glasgow and the North East with accents so strong that most of us cannie ken 'em. And no mention here of Calcutta or Bombay. Diction doesn't rank very high on the bank's agenda so you won't find many of their call centres in London and the South East.

Anyone who's ever visited a call centre knows they're populated at the rock face by so-called 'agents' working in cramped, manically noisy sweat-shop-like conditions. They're up against difficult-to-hit hourly call targets too and told to push some profitable financial product at us as a goodbye gift. For these reasons, nobody on a career path wants to work as a call centre agent. When did you last hear of anybody mentioning their ambition to work in a call centre?

So why is it that whenever I see an insurance ad on TV or receive an unsolicited letter showing a call centre operator, they always depict pretty young agents smiling through a row of orthodontically-correct teeth? They're the sort of person you'd love to be your wife, husband, daughter, son. And oh yes. They always work in a relaxed modern office with acres of clear desk space. They use the latest telephone and computer equipment.

Get real. Show it as it really is.