Long life | 7 April 2012

The most common lie you hear on the telephone is the one in which a recorded voice says, ‘Your call is important to us.’ Do not be fooled. Your call is not important to anyone, except to the extent that it warns an organisation that you would like to talk to one of its employees. Alarm bells go off, drawbridges are pulled up, and procedures are put into effect to ensure that you are thwarted in this presumptuous ambition. Members of staff then return to their peaceful routines, such as flirting with each other on the internet.

Companies pretend to put their customers first, but everyone knows that they don’t. Their normal priority is to arrange things for their own comfort and convenience. Elaborate systems are set up to protect their employees from the outside world and to see that they suffer as little aggravation as possible. Another corporate objective is to hold costs down, and this also means keeping contact with customers to a minimum. Most outsiders find these internal company arrangements fiendishly difficult to understand, but they disregard them at their peril.

It is like being back at school. Obedience to the rules is insisted upon, and failure is heavily penalised. If you order something by telephone, you are charged more for it than if you do so on the internet. If you try to pay by cheque, you will probably just be told that you can’t. A friend of mine wanted to give some money to St John’s Ambulance when a representative knocked on her door in Northampton the other day. She offered cash or a cheque, but neither was acceptable. Her only option was to sign a Direct Debit form, which she declined to do.