Please hold the line

28 June 2010

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A couple of weeks back I was sat in a call centre wearing a pair of 80’s throwback headphones (not retro-chic headphones just rubbish headphones) conducting some call listening as part of some research we were doing for a client.

Already flustered by having some dude sitting behind him pretending not to take notes, the agent I’m patched in to is on the line to a generically angry customer trying to figure out why their product isn’t working properly.

The agent is actually a nursing graduate, has barely even looked at the product, has worked on the job for about 3 weeks and doesn’t really know what the problem is. So the only way they can sort it out is by using an online troubleshooting guide to run through the steps and hope for the best.

So the agents got a window open for that, then another window open for their emails in case there’s any information there, plus another window open for their own notes and is shuffling between them all like some demented croupier and yup its going ok in a neurotic sort of way and then they need to check the customers account information for something and the window pops open and !Plink! The computer crashes. Oh dear… On with the hold button.

The agent deflates into a little ball of sobs.

Apart from the enormous fun I had actually being the person who may be monitoring your call for training purposes and not being the agent I think the above experience rather speaks to good old Bruno Latour and his god awful detective novel ‘Aramis. Or the Love of Technology’.

I won’t go into it, it is awful and you shouldn’t read it unless you have to, honestly, it’s about transit systems in Paris, but it is the text where he introduces Actor Network Theory (ANT) and ANT really provides a good framework for understanding the above situation. ANT seeks to map the relationships between the material (things) and the semiotic (concepts) and claims that only by doing so can we understand the true network of relationships that exist in any given situation.

So to understand what happened on the call it’s no good just looking at what the agent did wrong, or how they related to the customer, we also need to look at everything else that was involved in the situation. The people but also their ideas (or in this case their training) and the materials (the computer) they are using. To say that the call failed because the agent wasn’t able to manage the customer properly, or because their training wasn’t up to snuff would be just as nonsensical as suggesting that it failed because the computer crashed. It’s the interplay between all three that counts.

In fact ANT would also seek to take into account my presence, the customers own knowledge, the telephone being used to take the call, the environment of the office in which the agent was sitting, the management structure in place and pretty much everything in an ever-expanding spiral of information but I think that can be kept on hold for now. !Plink! Cue D-Ream.

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