A friend said to me the other day: “I always have my phone on silent.”
My initial thought was why do you have a phone at all? If you cannot hear it when someone is trying to call you then it is not a phone. OK, nowadays it is a portable computer terminal you have in your pocket, and I understand that for most of the younger generation they do not want to have to actually talk to people.
Using their portable computer as a communications device means sending and receiving messages in WhatsApp or Snapchat or Oh, I don’t know, I’m too old.com.
In the good old days, before the Internet, would you believe that communication was much better!
When we wanted to find someone’s phone number, we picked up a telephone directory and looked them up.
When we wanted to employ a tradesman or book a table in a restaurant, we picked up a big book called ‘yellow pages’ which listed all their numbers in handy categories.
We telephoned them and they answered the call. No, call centres, no automated systems and no mind-numbingly dull lift musak. We could have meaningful and productive conversations with real people who would give us real dates by which time their service would be delivered.
I know I am sounding like my granny when she kept telling me that ‘things were better’ in her day but I’m beginning to believe her.
Oh, I know that we are immeasurably better off now than then and that we have a higher quality standard of living, we have we could only dream of, we have technology that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents but, despite all that, I still think there are certain things that are less.
It is intrinsically more difficult to find and engage a service now.
If you do find a company on an Internet search engine they do not answer the phone, you can send an email but chances are that will not even be read.
I heard on a radio interview the other day a 20-something proudly boast that he does not read any of his emails and he probably has more than 10,000 unread ones in his company inbox. Sonny, if you worked for me and you had even one unread email before you left work for the day, don’t bother coming back tomorrow.
It is customer service that has suffered from this great unwillingness to deal with the here and now.
Again, I reiterate that back in the day someone answered your call and created a solution to your problem.
Now most companies, and banks, do not even publish a contact phone number.
The best you might get is a chat-box which is manned by a robot which, in most cases, is not even an artificial intelligence.
As a civilisation we are not progressing. We are a crowd slowly walking backwards into the dark ages. Backwards into the future.
jackie@JBeedie.com
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