Still Waiting to Hear from BT Ben...

although I did have a long conversation with a lady in his office today. That has to be one of the most thankless jobs in the world, handling complaints that go to the Office of the Chairman.

In 1981 I sat two cubicles away from George Harland, the most even tempered person on the planet. He was the bank's Vice President handling complaint calls that came into the President's office. He never once raised his voice in the two years I was there and I often wondered where he went at the end of each day... whether he locked himself in his car and primal screamed his way home or crawled inside of a bottle from the pressure. He was never flustered and you could often hear the other end of the phone line buzzing in his ear. At a law firm in LA I joked with the IT guy who received grief from everyone (and we know solicitors to be of low ego strength and full of patience) that I was being extra nice to him because when he came into the office with the AK-47 I wanted him to briefly flash - "Denis - friend," and move on to the next target.

The BT conversation started as most do, quite tensely as there was the public face of a very public department defending the actions of the company by... explaining their policy. Having done some executive coaching, I felt in the unique position of letting her wind herself down. I was long past attempting to gain a financial settlement and really now just trying to get some answers and a conversation/dialogue with Ben.

After getting past bouts of "no sir, you are twisting my words, that is not what I meant at all," I hung in until we eventualy peeled away the outer shell and engaged in a meaningful discussion. The turning point was when even she admitted the recorded voice stating "we are VERY BUSY" was infuriating.

Indeed the people I feel most sorry for inside BT are the career employees of 10-30 years who remain consummate professinals and remember the days when a single person could and would work their way through the system to resolve an issue completely for a customer.

Since most of our conversation was off the record, I will honour that. There was a wistfulness to her tone I also heard in the voices of dedicated service team members like Chris and David in Sheffield and each engineer who visited the house. All truly wanted to get to the bottom of the problem and felt completely flummoxed by the system.

So my question remains, it is indeed broken, what can be done to fix it in a way that people have responsibility to help a customer? Calling those poor young kids in India who have one hand tied behind their back reading help screens, people working under such metrics pressure to handle x number of calls per hour to obtain passing grades for swiftly passing a call along but getting no credit or are chastised for taking the time to actually resolve an issue or indeed think logically may be efficient, but it does not earn points. We live in a call centre mentality world that does nothing to help where we are as customers.

I asked her if there was a way to have a dialogue with Ben as it seemed these were important questions. She said she would file her report on the conversation and pass my request onward. Here's hoping we get there.

I feel a bit like Michael Moore trying to interview then GM chair Roger Smith in the film Roger and Me. Stay tuned.