Call centres were invented with cost-savings, and not customers, in mind. You first listen to an automated message of how important your call is, and that it will be recorded for quality purposes. (The first is a lie, and if they ever listen to those recordings, they will immediately abandon them). Then comes the inevitable list of up to nine options, with an additional one to speak to an agent. Some companies have even added the option of listening to them all again. Then follows the inevitable message: “All our agents are currently busy. We will attend to your call as soon as an agent becomes available.” For the next ten minutes, you listen to terrible music interspersed with promotional snippets of how fantastic the company is.

This is a classic example of a “captured” audience alienated by an attack on their intelligence. When at last an agent does answer, it could just as well have been a computer: He or she does not know the answer to your problem. Remember, call centre agents can sit in India to answer a query arising from an event right here in Port Elizabeth. They are trained to answer only the most basic questions. Before you can say “call centre,” he says: “I will transfer you to our service department.” There you end up with music in your ears, and the battle for information starts all over again. A call centre is a contradiction in terms. They should be called “no-call centres”. What should enhance communication, is in fact impeding contact between a business and its customers. I have found a solution: You go to any local branch of the company in question. You see a real person there and say: “While I sit here, just try and call yourself. Here is the number in case you do not know it.” There is nothing like shame to jolt people into action.