Fictional call centre characters #2 Vroom

Vroom’s Managerial Matrix

Book: One Night at the Call Centre by Chetan Bhagat

Name(s): Varun Malhotra/ Agent Victor Mell/ Vroom

Employer: Connexions (India)

A struggling outsourcer with a call centre in Guragong Connexions take calls for their one and only client the U.S firm Western Computer and Appliances. Call flow is however dwindling and the future of the firm is in question.

Vroom’s call centre journey:

Young and idealistic the college educated Vroom was originally working as a journalist, but took a job in the call centre due to the better money on offer. This choice is a constant source of tension for Vroom, who finds call centre work hard and though he tries to justify his choice by pointing out that with economic wealth comes greater power  he also reflects on the hollowness of consumer society and the relatively low wages of Indian call centre workers compared to workers in the West.

Finest call centre moment:

Without a doubt developing Vroom’s managerial matrix. In Vroom’s own words:

There are four kind of bosses in this world, based on two dimensions: a) how smart or stupid they are and b) whether they are good or evil. Only with extreme good luck do you get a boss who is smart and a good human being.

Worst call centre moment:

Routinely abused by rude, angry and above all stupid customers. Vroom’s worst moment comes when he receives racial abuse from a drunk caller leaving him visibly distressed, trembling and breathing heavily.

What does Vroom represent:

The tragedy of wasted talent. With his education Vroom could be a journalist making a difference in society, but instead he’s wasting this potential in the call centre. Vroom is also representative of the tensions of the outsourcing model where power lies with the big Western companies who profit by paying comparatively lower wages and with the Western consumers who act in an abusive way towards the virtually powerless call centre workers.

Interview update

A huge thank you to everyone who has so far contributed to the Call Centre interviews. I Have just added three new interviews which can be seen along with the others here.

All the responses so far have been interesting and thought-provoking  such as passage from friendly pariah, in which they succinctly get to the heart of what is, at least in my experience, the problem with call centres:

unfortunately It’s too easy for a company to outsource and forget about the people taking calls. Why should they care, they paid some other company to care and that company only cares about the bottom line. I know that companies have to care about the bottom line but does it have to be set so low?

Whilst on the other hand K’s description of a celebrity encounter finds itself at the top of the list of calls-I-wish-I’d-taken:

I assisted a small-time Aussie “celebrity” apply for credit, and she was declined. Her reaction of ‘Dont you know who I am?’ was pretty priceless!

Priceless indeed.

The end of the call-centre as we know it?

News update from the call centre; Peggy the manager has revealed that Big-Al had been attempting to sell the call-centre all along however, a buyer has still not been found.  Staff have also now been told that they will have to ‘give something back’ by working 2.5 hours without pay each week. This all seems rather desperate. Could this be the beginning of the end for the call centre? Maybe it’s simply an isolated case down to mismanagement, but maybe it’s also part of a bigger trend; has the whole call centre industry after some two decades, finally had its day?

For some reason working in a call centre seems to bring forth fantasies of its destruction, not necessarily in any cathartic sense, though Tristen Black’s description of his call-centre being swallowed up into a hell portal is particularly fetching, more I’m thinking in the sense of their obsolescence that one day the whole sorry industry will finally be put out of its misery.I particularly like a passage from the novel Eight minutes Idle in which the protagonist, Dan Thomas, jumps into a conversation between two other characters in a lift, The subject of discussion is the end of the call-centre;

‘So what do you think?’ Glasses asks Moustache. ‘Is it only a matter of time before call-centres are abolished?’

‘I doubt it’ he answers wearily. ‘Mertz wanted to make an impression, that’s all.’

‘Maybe, but he sounded convincing.’

‘Cause he’s a zealot, that’s why. And what better way of thumbing his nose at management? Telling them their world’s about to become obsolete guarantees him a future.’

‘I dunno. He must be pretty sure of himself.’

‘Wouldn’t you be? Half the world’s just converted to his cause and the other half’s terrified of it.’

‘So he’s right?’

‘No, he’s not right. It’s not like TV and telephones. Doing business over the computer completely removes the human element. Most people still need a voice.’

‘But they don’t get a voice,’ I interject, before reciting, ‘all our operators are busy at the moment… please hold and we’ll answer your call as soon as possible.’

‘So why do they keep calling?’

‘Because they’re all crazy old ladies,’ I tell him, pleased to be giving my theories an airing. ‘Look, it’s obvious. Call-centres are really doing three separate jobs. Giving people information, selling insurance, and listening to old people complain. Sure, the first two probably could be managed without operators. But computers couldn’t cope with complaints, not satisfactorily. They’ll keep us around as a public service.’

The book was published in 1999 and call centres are still with us some 13 years on. In that time the domestic call centre industry has also defied predictions that it would be decimated by outsourcing and in fact can even be said to have  thrived with the Guardian reporting in 2005  that “the growth in call centre jobs in Britain was almost three times greater than that for overall employment in the past four years.” It seems as that Mertz was wrong, or was it just that he just too early?

Last year telecommunications firm Talk Talk cited falling volumes and the increased use of ‘web based support’ as the reason behind a decision to close their Waterford call centre with a loss of 575 jobs and recently British Gas announced the closure of it’s Southampton call centre with a reported 500 job losses stating that it is now “dealing with more customers through digital channels.”

It seems that the call centre born itself from advances in technological advances in communication systems is now becoming surpassed by their further development and our acclimatization to using tools such as the internet.

As Dan Thomas suggests in Eight Minutes Idle it really appears that the only people keeping call-centres going are the ‘crazy old ladies’. Indeed I’d say that most of my callers seemed to be older people. Amongst older customers there is still a view of the internet as a dangerous unknown entity, a veritable wild-west of stolen card details and identity theft, whilst on the other hand anyone else only really called if the website is down with one lady I spoke to struggling for over half an hour with the website and making two calls before she relented and finally allowed us to take her order by phone.

So Mertz’s vision of the demise of the call-centre will surely eventually come to pass as Dan Fox, a marketing analyst, points out in an online article call-centres will not be able to rely on a diminishing group of internet-phobes;

Those in the first group turn to call centers for a few reasons. The first and most obvious is that the caller isn’t comfortable or familiar with the Internet. This is clearly not sustainable, because at a certain point everyone will be familiar and comfortable with the Internet.

But, before we rush to mourn (or perhaps rejoice at) the demise of the call centre there is perhaps one thing on which the call-centre could pin its hopes. Could emotion be the salvation for call-centres? Dan Fox, like Dan Thomas, concludes that despite all its flaws the call-centre offers something that new technology is as yet unable to..

although the individual customer service representative could probably care less about your late shipment, we assume the voice on the other end has empathy and can understand your problems and what you would like to accomplish by the end of the phone call.

What Dan Fox sees is an evolution, a new type of call centre, the emotional centre of a “multi-modal” approach to customer service. Bruno Morriset  a French Geographer agrees with this view that the call-centre has entered a new phase in its development. In an academic conference paper impressively titled The Rise of the Call Center Industry: Splintering and Virtualization of the Economic Space he sets out that;

the call center industry itself is entering an upgrading process, illustrated by new words such as contact center, information center, data center, data processing unit, web call center etc. The future of the CRM industry, especially in developed countries, lies in multimedia, more complex tasks, involving rising opportunities for skilled people. Routine-oriented only sites are threatened by technical developments and automation processes, such as voice recognition. Last but not least, customers themselves will soon ask for more personalized services, not for parrot-fashion messages: fifty million U.S. citizens have already subscribed to the federal “do-notcall” list, which bans unsolicited telephone messages from televendors

It seems therefore that we arrive at a rather positive note. The call-centre can claim a future, but in a new form as contact centre, and for critics of the call centre what does appear to promise to face a slide into irrelevance are some of the worst aspects of call-centres; the dull, repetitive tasks, the overwhelming focus on volumes rather than on the quality of interactions and the accompanying lack of respect for and investment in maintaining happy, motivated, well-skilled staff.

Team 4x

I’ve been away from the call-centre all week and it feels great. I’ve even managed to fire off a job application for a position in another call-centre so my fingers are tightly crossed waiting on a call early next week. If all goes well I’ll then have the task of getting time off for the interview… do I tell the truth and risk having the request denied, or do I just call in sick? Tough call.

I saw another old colleague last night. One who had put the best part of a decade in at the call centre and who I felt was particularly good at the job. She told me she’s now doing a cleaning job which she told me is much better as “I don’t have to deal with angry xxxx Inc customers.” That’s the thing with the call-centre even the people who seem to be handling it well are feeling the strain too.

This is probably a good point to introduce the story of the fate of what I’ll call ‘team xxxx’ or ‘team 4x’ for short. The background to this tale is one of our main clients xxxx Inc who operate their business on what could loosely be called a subscription model. Their whole way of doing business is however, a shambles and they are notorious for their small print and botched admin. They have a computer system which is also updated once a week so say you place a request on Monday then it won’t be carried out until the next Sunday and the accounts department are based at head office which is on the continent. The lines of communication are so slow it’s like in the days of the empire when some officer acting on initiative would annexe half a continent before anyone in charge back home knew anything about it. Cue lots of crossed wires and customers raging at ‘reminders’ received a month after they sent their payment in, or goods showing up six weeks after they wrote to cancel. That’s even if they ordered them. Some people fail to notice the small print signing them up to an ongoing service, or else the other call centre which takes care of new orders signs people up without filling them in on all the necessary details.

All this makes taking calls for xxxx inc a stressful business. Customers are usually angry and you’ll be dealing with the same issues again ad infinitum…. “I’ve just had a package from you which I did NOT order” or “I cancelled it last month this is all a con” or another classic “I don’t owe you anything and you’ve sent me a reminder how dare you!” Your job is to soak up the crap and then trot out the same explanations that head office is overseas which means communication often ‘crosses in the post’ or that they may not have been told when they placed their initial order that other items would follow unless they cancelled we’re very sorry thankyou.

Frustratingly head office seem to be lacking in interest in the UK operation. XXXX inc is actually a massive operation split into multiple subsidiaries spanning the continent and they simply have little time for us. Someone tried using my log-in once locked me out and it took head office three weeks to get round to issuing a new password. Customers have no hope. A constant grumble is with the packaging of their parcels. This has been going on for as long as I’ve been there and we’ve fought hard to get the message across, logging incidences, sending pictures,  but frustratingly all to no avail and we must listen to each new occurence with the right amount of empathy on tap as the customer details every rip, crush, and tear acting as if we haven’t heard it all 1000 times before.

But, back to team 4x. The team was the creation of our then new manager who either acting under pressure, seeking to impress, or some combination of both decided we would need to improve our pitiful retention figures. It seemed when people called to cancel their subscriptions we displayed no real interest in persuading them to stay; Rather unsurprising as we had no incentive to do so and most of us viewed, and still view, xxxx Inc with a degree of contempt for the reasons discussed at length above. Anyway four people were selected from the pool of Customer Service Advisor’s and re-located to the corner. There they discussed strategy and drew charts on the wall showing the percentage retained each day along with a tick signifying an improvement on the day before, or cross if there was a decline.

Team 4x was something of a watershed moment for the call-centre as we’d previously been a generic mass. Something about rubbish jobs breeds a sense of togetherness and we felt we were all in it together. Team 4x though soon began to develop a swagger. They were actually asked their opinions and given responsibilities, however small these were, so felt important. The rest of us began to regard them with suspicion consigning their memo’s to the bin without reading them. Ultimately though team 4x is a cautionary tale. The relentless pressure, the being caught between customers and an indifferent organisation, the strain of being at the front with no respite took its toll. One member had a breakdown, taking a number of months off sick and returning only with the proviso that they would no longer take calls for xxxx Inc. A second member is also no longer taking xxxx Inc calls whilst a third, previous a relatively good employee, lost all interest and just walked. Like a horror movie only one person, a real call centre veteran, made it through to the end.

 

 

Hanging on the telephone

This may sound strange, but sometimes I’m secretly pleased when I get a shouty customer. It can be just the thing to break the monotony of order taking allowing me to lean back, give my fingers a rest from the key board and surf the wave of rage.

I was also delighted this week my ‘Hello XXXX inc call-guy speaking how can I help?’ spiel met with a furious response. It was like opening an airlock door the anger pouring into the empty space knocking me slightly off balance….. ‘Oh thank you I’ve been waiting for 20 minutes to get through to you and I’ve been trying to get through for three days now, what is going on there, why don’t you employ more staff if you’re so busy?’

I wish I could tell the truth; that a supposed cash flow crisis has led to us having our hours cut despite us being busy and even though we are being worked mercilessly by management who are piling on the pressure on us to make up for their mistakes we have no chance of keeping up with it. That to top it off we get the flack from customers angry at having difficulty getting through. I have however, developed a strategy. What I do is to agree with the customer, very loudly placing emphasis on certain points “yes, yes I’m so sorry you’ve been WAITING 20 MINUTES and I will happily pass on your comments to my managers that WE NEED MORE STAFF, yes, you can be assured I will” I say as I look towards my manager sat in her position facing us her eyes, as usual, glued to her stats feed.

It’s not just for my managers benefit either. I know some of our clients listen to recordings of the calls so I want to draw out as much as possible “you couldn’t get through on Tuesday you say, so how long were you waiting on the line?” Enough of these and surely they would be demanding my managers get more people on the phones pronto.

And so it appears to have proved. I got a call from my manager on Friday afternoon “just to let you know after next week we’re back to normal” First thought is great, second thought is what about my holiday and all the arrangements I’ve made, we were told this situation would be until the end of August and I’ve planned accordingly. I know a few other colleagues have been enjoying having a day off each week and don’t want to go back to their old hours.

In other separate, or possibly very related developments Big Al and Steve-o were dressed in their finest business garb, all pin-stripes and cuff links, for a meeting on Tuesday with two mystery men who seemed to be taking a good look around after they emerged from the office in the far corner of the centre. Now, a couple of weeks ago the firm was also been giving away stationery with our logo the official story being it was a warehouse clear out and in addition to this I have learnt Big Al has dissolved some company names relating to us which he had held. Looks like our company name is surplus to requirements. My money, as it had been right at the start, is on a take-over.

You only live twice: so stop worrying about call-times

The irony of the call centre is that you can speak all day, but never have a conversation. The pressure to drive call times down and thus push profits up. For an operator it means like a racing driver it is all about keeping to the racing line, controlling the call with the utmost precision, easing it round the bends whilst avoiding the debris, oil slicks and crashes which can conspire to wreck your call time. Unsurprisingly after a whole day this can leave you feeling as mentally exhausted as if you’d taken part in the Le Mans 24 hour race.

It’s also profoundly alienating for both us and customers. In other jobs I’ve enjoyed the rapport with customers, but this is actively discouraged in the call-centre and was typically the subject of one of those management memos a while back ‘it’s nice to chat to customers’ it read ‘but please refrain.’ A call from a customer is seen not as an opportunity to connect, or engage with them, perhaps even to the long-term advantage of the company, but like anything else in the call-centre it is viewed soley through the prism of cold, hard statistics. A viewpoint which ensures each call becomes a mechanical transaction stripped of any traces of warmth and humanity.

In some ways our clients are to blame by outsourcing their customer service function. Generally the terms of the contracts mean my company receives an amount of money per-call dealt with, so whilst it may not be in our clients interest to offer at best bare-bones customer service in an attempt keep times low, it is definitely in the interests of my firm. To any business people out there who may chance upon this don’t ever outsource your customer service its a real no-brainer.

We have target average call-times for each client we deal with and a chart is published monthly. It is then circulated and stuck on a wall. As I have previously discussed it is the cause of a small flurry of excitement as people seek to compare their performance with that of their colleagues assessing where they are in the pecking-order. When I first started I joined in with this ritual to the point where I would despair when I got a chatty, forgetful or just plain difficult customer and could only watch helplessly as the clock on my phone broke through the ten of fifteen minute mark.
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At the beginning of the year I had an epiphany. What if I just refused to play along and stopped looking at the chart? So I did. Almost immediately I felt much happier, much more relaxed and customers started thanking me for my patience. I had liberated myself from the tyranny of the call-time average.

It meant today that I could enjoy an elderly customers ten minute anecdote about how his work for a hydraulic lift company meant he travelled all over Europe and also included being an extra in the James Bond film You only live twice in which he features in the volcano scene. The customer was clearly delighted to have someone listening to their story and for my part I was happy to oblige.

The Lost 2000

I have it on good authority that we lost 2000 calls this week. Lost being the call-centre term for when a caller hangs up in frustration at not being able to get through.

Companies absolutely hate it when this happens as it means in many cases especially on our more order focused, as opposed to customer service, lines lots of lost revenue rather than just the less tangible loss of goodwill. During our inductions we were also told it means lost revenue for us the HR manager repeatedly stressing the need to be ready to take calls at our appointed start time. It may be only one or two calls they said, but it was all lost money.

Curious then that I heard our manager responding to a question about call volumes earlier in the week, no doubt inspired by a customers complaint that they had been hanging on for 20 minutes. No volumes were usual, our manager reported, its just we have less operators because of the cuts to our hours.

All week I have watched the scrolling display we have notch up previously unheard of numbers of calls being lost 60, 80, 1oo+. The statistics so unusual as to seem otherworldly; like looking at the football results and seeing Man Utd 15 Chelsea 27. As I watched these figures I wondered what our clients would be thinking. Sure we’d been told our hours needed to be cut to stem a cash-flow crisis, but the companies who employ us aren’t likely to be understanding of this. Many of them have paid huge-sums for full page ads in the mainstream press and will no doubt be furious that our mis-management has cost them money.

It seems everyone is unhappy. We are unhappy as we have lost money, many of us struggling to pay the bills anyway face being plunged into our own cash-flow crisis. Our customers are unhappy at waiting so long to get through “I think you need more staff” some say when they finally get connected.. if only they knew. Finally our client firms will be unhappy at their lost revenue….

But do the clients know about this? Some believe they don’t, in fact if they did know we would be in hot water, but what about the statistics, how are these being explained away and whatsmore how will they be explained away over three months? How will this also affect our long-term relationships with clients, if they think we’re not up to the job? I mean money speaks loudest of all in business and if they have an inkling we’re losing it for them by understaffing.. we’ll surely it’s not a good idea to upset the people who pay our bills???

p.s if anyone noticed I got the figure earlier wrong it is actually a staggering 2000 calls lost this week, not just the 1000 I thought earlier!

Creative scribblings

A colleague recently shared a link with me for a webcomic named ‘pictures for sad children.’ Their eye must have been caught by a particularly funny sequence featuring a call-centre which deals with multiple clients and bears just the slightest resemblance to our own piece of the call centre universe.

The sequence in question features a ghost named Paul training Gary who is a new member of staff.  I particularly love the part where having listened to a call in which for want of a better description Paul fobs the customer off  Gary then appears slightly disillusioned with all that he has just witnessed. The dialogue which follows is thus:

Gary:  So. People talk to us to feel better.

Paul: Basically

Gary: Though we don’t change anything

Paul: It’s like prayer. Except you can hear us

Gary: I think when I call a company this is exactly what I suspect is going on.

I love that scene because it is so right. As an operator I often find myself promising customers that their concerns over some aspect of a product or the way a company does things will be passed on, but I know from experience that anything I do pass on will get filed in the waste-paper basket.

Most recently a customer called with a complaint about a product. I managed to deal with this quickly and easily by organising a replacement, but the customer also asked If I could pass on the details of her complaint to the managing director of the company. “Just knock on his door and let him know” the customer suggested “you may even get a bonus for bringing this issue to his attention” they then added. I hadn’t the heart to tell them that the MD who I have never, nor am ever likely to meet, or in any case even speak to, is in a location over 100 miles away. Even if I could overcome this and knock on his door I am however fairly confident he is unlikely to be interested and that I would be immediately escorted from the premises.

Still. I had a nice doodle in front of me by the end of the call.

All I know is that I don’t know nothing

So far this week has been our quietest of the year. On Tuesday there must have been about only five or six of us in and even then people were being encouraged to take a half-day as there are simply not enough calls to go round. The double bank holidays haven’t really helped us as for one of our principal clients it has caused a lot of disruption around delivery dates so their business has taken a dip. Whether it then  bounces back will be a big litmus test for the business otherwise it will be a pretty bleak summer and we may even see some compulsory lay-offs before things pick up in the final third of the year as we build up to the manic crescendo that is our Christmas period.

We do have one company which sells summer goods and whose business has picked up a bit as the sun has put in an appearance providing us with a glimmer of hope. However, despite us taking on their order-line sometime last year and a  few months back taking on their full customer service we still haven’t been given any training, or even been shown their products – all we have is some info printed off from their website which seeing as most customers are already looking at this info themselves is as useful as, well, it’s just not useful at all and leads to us looking stupid:

Customer: Hi, I was just wondering if you do replacement thingymajigs

Me: What thingymajig do you mean?

Customer: You know the thingymajig which fits into the whatsistname

Me: I’m afraid I don’t know what either the thingymajig or whatsitsname is

Customer: Do you know anything about these products?

Me: I’m afraid not, I’ll have to get someone to call you back.

Customer: How long will that take?

Me: I’m afraid the call-back policy is 48 hours.

Customer: Can’t you ask someone who does know?

Me: I’m afraid company ‘bums on seats’ policy prevents me from leaving my desk if I do I will receive a black mark against my name..

Maybe the last bit is made up, but this is actually how some conversations go simply because I’m not given the tools I need to do my job so I get to look like an obstinate fool all summer long.

Service Vs Sales

Yesterday was a fabulously sunny day and one which I enjoyed by spending some time in the garden of a Mediterranean-style tapas bar with a couple of call-centre colleagues past and present.

Strangely, and maybe because of the good weather, we didn’t talk all that much about work as can sometimes happen at these kind of meetings where anyone in the party not connected with the call-centre finds themselves in a rather unenviable position among a bunch of people talking shop. Even more strangely as my acquaintance with two of my colleagues pre-dated my time at the call-centre it was occasionally myself in this position.

What we did briefly talk about was how we were less than content with our manager and don’t see things improving under the current regime, but only getting steadily worse; worse being  a much more target-driven culture with even more emphasis on things like upselling, or in the case of subscription type services ‘retentions’ – that is keeping customers who call to cancel. Fortunately however, we didn’t dwell long enough on this pessimism to sour the good mood of the day.

What also came up during this brief conversation was  the ways in which we resist these pressures. One way is to simply fake a retention for the stats to chalk it up when it never happened in the hope that no-one will actually bother to take the time to check, or similarly logging an unrelated call – one where the customer has not expressed any wish to cancel as a retention. This logic also works for upsells; someone calls to order a product in a larger quantity or size; then log it as an upsell.

There is an issue of ethics here; can such a deception ethical? The answer is in terms of loyalty to our employer and our client firms possibly not, but it must be remembered that our contracting-out status makes these relationships more abstract. I don’t think anyone sees it as deceiving our employer, instead it is deceiving the firms we take calls on behalf of; firms with which we often have a difficult relationship with. As front-line staff for instance we take the flack when one of these companies messes up and also take flack over issues with a firms products or services which come up again and again, yet are powerless to affect any sort of change. It is also very rare for these firms to say or do anything by way of thanks after a particularly busy, or turbulent time though it must be said there is one exception to this who after their busy period sent down a few large boxes chocolates, a small gesture maybe, but one which shows there is at least some thought of us whilst they’re busy counting the cash from the orders we’ve handled.

This one example of good-practice aside it is factors such as these above which serve to re-enforce our distance from the companies we take calls for. In general we are treated as mercenaries and in turn adopt a mercenary attitude, if we don’t receive an incentive for upselling, or retaining, then there’s little chance of us bothering as loyalty simply doesn’t exist in our relationship. Our management recognise this feeling and try to counter this by insisting that by pleasing our clients we are securing our firms position and therefore our jobs, this they argue should be our incentive. Some people may subscribe to this, but in the main I believe there has a degree of scepticism around this just so long as people get the feeling from the volume of calls we handle that the firms are doing quite well as it is (possibly something which may be about to change as it gets quieter and quieter)

Whilst so far I have provided an excuse for our acts of resistance, I have not, at least I feel, provided an adequate justification. I will now turn to this. The justification, the prime justification, for our manipulating of the statistics is that there is at present a clash of cultures. On the one hand we have our manager, from a sales background, who is keen to use her experience in this area for the benefit of our clients and our company. On the other we have a team of people whose job title is ‘customer service’ where a colleague once memorably put it, with a hint of pride, “I do customer service I don’t do sales.” Our reading of customer service, and the way it has hitherto been practiced among us, is in the main, giving the customer what they want; if this is a smaller size, or if this is to cancel a subscription, then our job is to carry out this request. Quite plainly our role is to serve the customer.

There is another way of viewing this which is the sales-person’s way; that is in terms of a cancellation we do customers a service by offering alternatives and incentives to continue which they may wish to take up, and when upselling we provide them with an opportunity. Quite possibly this is the view espoused within ‘the BIG book of sales’ a voluminous tome which resides on, or around my managers desk. Maybe there is some point to it, but personally it doesn’t sit comfortably with me. I know that when I call a firm to cancel I have given the matter some thought and made up my mind before picking up the phone, and I know I certainly didn’t appreciate a call from my new car insurance company offering me (or attempting to scare me into – again depending on your viewpoint) extra cover over and above my fully-comp policy.

Maybe though this is me. Are customer-services and sales two reconcilable philosophies, or are they fundamentally contradictory?