Jogging Along

by James Birk

Chapter 11

  ‘But when I am actually going to get my policy?’ asked the old man impatiently.

  I sighed, as I repeated myself for the seventh time.

  ‘Your policy is currently with our medical underwriters, they have written out for more information based on a report that they received from your GP. Until they receive that report, they won’t be able to sign off your policy.’ I explained.

  ‘And how long will that take?’ asked the old man.

  ‘Hopefully not too long, but it is difficult to confirm as we are reliant on a third party in this instance,’ I trotted out the party line.

  ‘And what specific medical condition are they trying to find out about?’ enquired the old man, not unreasonably.

  ‘Unfortunately, due to confidentiality, I am unable to divulge that information over the phone.’ I answered feebly.

  ‘But it’s my medical history! Surely I’m entitled to know!’ the old man was getting quite upset.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I agreed, ‘unfortunately, as I’m not a medical underwriter, I’m not entitled to know, which is why I can’t divulge that information.’

  ‘Well can speak to one of the medical people then?’

  ‘Unfortunately they don’t actually take phone calls, as I explained,’ I mumbled pathetically.

  ‘But I can’t move house until I get my policy sorted,’ raged the man, ‘why don’t they take phone calls?’

  ‘Apparently they’re too busy,’ I cringed, ‘but if you would like to put your enquiry in writing, I’m sure they will respond.’

  ‘Well what is the point of having a phone number if I can’t get any answers?’ he fumed, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous. I’ve a good mind to write to the Daily Mail!’

  With that the line went dead. I took advantage of the absence of any managers in my pod to switch my phone off for a few moments. I typed a few cursory notes onto the old man’s file and then closed it down, secure in the knowledge that nothing productive would be done before he got frustrated enough to phone again in a few weeks’ time. He could carry out his threat and go to the Daily Mail, but in reality, institutionalised poor customer service was far too commonplace to be of interest to a middle-market tabloid.

  It had been several weeks since my little sabbatical with the training team, and nothing had particularly changed since I’d re-joined New Business. Well nothing had changed for the better anyway. Since my return to the mundane world of processing applications there had been a marked change for the worse as Grant in his wisdom had disbanded the CFT and instead implemented a rota, whereby a member of each processing team would have an allocated day for working in the CFT instead of carrying out their normal duties.

  For the uninitiated in FFS terminology, CFT stood for Customer Facing Team and was in essence the call centre aspect of the New Business section. FFS had its own dedicated call centre in another building, where poorly trained personnel took queries from the general public and unintentionally misinformed them about the various products and services offered by the company. The CFT was more of a specialist team dedicated specifically to life assurance products, and even more specifically to new applications for those products. If you needed to make a claim on a life assurance policy for example, you would need to contact an entirely different office.

  Consequently calls from the general public didn’t come through very often, which was just as well, as when they did they were dealt with about as efficiently as I’d just managed with the old man. Nonetheless we did receive a high volume of calls from various financial advisors and the like who earned a commission from selling our products and were thus very keen to see progress on the applications they had submitted. These were the kind of aggressive, scruple-free monsters that would sell their own grandmother a broken walking stick if it allowed them to turn a small profit. Suffice it to say it was not nice receiving a phone call from these people and I had often felt pity for the poor saps stuck working in CFT day after day. Admittedly once the new policy came in of us all having to take turns in CFT that pity had turned to anger. After all they had applied for a job answering telephones in the first place and now they were getting to spend their time doing my much more passive job, while I had to deal with the aggression of overpaid idiots screaming down the line at me. Miserably failing to help an old man who had been nothing but courteous at the start of the phone call, was actually going to be the highlight of my day.

  A polite cough signalled to me that Gruff, the CFT manager (and in fairness a relatively decent human being for the most part) had returned to the pod and that I could no longer justify having my phone switched off. Had it been Grant, the cough would have been less than polite. No sooner had I switched my phone on than it started ringing.

  ‘Hello, can I speak to Tim please,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone. Happy though I would have been to hand over the phone to Tim at that moment, it was not CFT policy to transfer calls to staff working elsewhere, besides which, Tim was up to his usual tricks and avoiding work by wandering around the office carrying a miscellaneous file.

  ‘I’m afraid the Tim is unavailable at the moment, my name’s Chris, can I be of assistance?’

  ‘Hi Chris, Phil Clegg here, are you sure Tim is not available, it’s just that he was helping me out with a particular case,’

  ‘I’m sure I can help Phil,’ I said with an absolute certainty that I couldn’t.

  ‘Right, well if you could have a look at this one for me Chris,’ he reeled off a reference number and I tapped it into my keyboard.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Jones?’ I checked.

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Phil maintaining a friendly demeanour.

  ‘It’s still with our Medical Underwriters,’ I said, reading the last log on the screen, ‘They’re awaiting a GP report.’

  ‘Well this is the thing Chris,’ Phil’s voice was developing an edge to it, ‘it was waiting for that report when I spoke to Tim, and he said he’d chase it up for me.’

  I knew with absolute certainty that Tim had done nothing of the sort, that he’d really only said he’d do something to get Phil off the phone, and I could tell already that Phil was not the nice friendly colleague he was currently pretending to be, but the awkward sort of pain in the arse that was about to make my day a lot worse if I couldn’t get rid of him soon.

  ‘Let me just read through the notes on this one and see where Tim has got to,’ I replied.

  Unlike my earlier caller, who had indeed received what could only be described as shoddy customer service, Mr and Mrs Jones had a relatively new application, and although it was no doubt a bit frustrating for them, as GP reports generally slowed things down, they were unlikely to have to wait too much longer before their application was processed. Evidently though, Phil was hoping for a slightly earlier pay day, and I realised that if took the hard line I was supposed to take and told him he’d just have to wait, I was likely to receive an earful of abuse, which was why Tim had wimped out and promised to do something he had no intention of doing.

  And if it was good enough for Tim if was good enough for me.

  ‘Ok Phil, it looks as though Tim has chased this up and the report has been sent to us,’ I lied, ‘so this one should be up and running in a few days.’

  ‘That’s fantastic news!’ exclaimed Phil, ‘so I can inform my clients that their policy will be actioned in a few days.’

  ‘Assuming there are no problems with the report then I can’t see why not,’ I continued, knowing full well that it would be some other poor sap fielding the call by the time Phil realised he hadn’t received his cheque.

  Seeing Tim walking past on a slightly unconventional route back to his desk I added, ‘would you like me to get Tim to give you a call to confirm.’

  Tim spun on his heel and with a malevolent grin stuck his middle finger up at me.

  ‘Yeah that would be great!’ said Phil, bizarrely optimistic about a phone call he would never receive.

  Working in CFT was
pretty depressing, not least because it was much harder to skive. The phones were monitored and if you didn’t answer enough calls it generally meant an unpleasant conversation with Grant, which we were all anxious to avoid. Being resourceful, I had developed a technique, which while being far from fool proof, did afford me the odd break away from the phones. It was brilliant in its simplicity, and if anything it made me seem slightly more committed to good customer service, which was about as far away from the truth as it was possible to be. My technique was simple; I occasionally offered to call people back.

  Technically CFT was primarily meant for incoming calls, but as management was keen to stress the difference between what we did and what call centre workers did (which was fundamentally exactly the same thing) they didn’t frown too heavily on you switching your phone off if it was for the purpose of looking into a specific customer’s problem in more detail. Ninety-five per cent of our calls were easily resolved, as most of the time an application had stalled due to a lack of medical information, which had then been sent out for. However on occasion it was possible to highlight an application that had been delayed due to misfiling or some other clerical error, and these could usually be resolved by getting up and finding the file and then plonking it on the appropriate person’s desk. Having resolved one or two queries like this myself, I noticed that none of the managers ever really checked why I had got out of my seat and wandered off so I started doing it more frequently. I couldn’t do it too often, because most of the other people in CFT didn’t do it at all, but occasionally a call would present me with the opportunity to wander off into the ‘pending’ section to look for a file that I knew with certainty wouldn’t be there. The most I could hope for was ten minute reprieve, but it was better than nothing.

  I decided to implement this strategy on the next call. It was another agent who wasn’t even bothering to pretend to be nice, as Phil Clegg had done, and whose opening gambit had been ‘Are you all complete morons down there at FFS.’

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to resolve his problem, but for some reason I had found that irate people could often be placated by a return phone call even if it yielded no benefits, because they were so certain that they wouldn’t get a call back that they became completely disarmed upon receiving one.

  I hung up on the irate agent, and wandered off into the filing section. There were a couple of attractive looking temps busy ‘pending’, and even though I wasn’t really going to actively look for a file, they were slightly in my way, so I wandered into the coffee room instead to grab a number twelve.

  I took a sip of the reassuringly poor quality coffee and turned around to ensure that there were no managers lurking around. There weren’t, but there was someone even less welcome in the room.

  ‘Hi Chris,’ said Cheryl in a friendly but inquisitive manner.

  ‘Alright,’ I grunted.

  I had managed to successfully avoid her since we’d spent the night together, an impressive feat given that we worked on the same floor as each other. I had been aided by the fact that unlike Tim and me, Cheryl seemed to have been promoted slightly as a result of her time with the training team, which I suppose, was fair enough because she had been with FFS a lot longer. Consequently she had been out of the office on various training courses, but nonetheless she had been in the same open plan office as me, albeit at the other end of the floor, on enough occasions, to make me look like a bit of a bastard for not speaking to her.

  In my defence, I hadn’t been avoiding Cheryl for ignoble reasons. I really wasn’t the ‘love them and leave them’ type and I wouldn’t have been even if I had been that successful with the ladies. I didn’t particularly fancy Cheryl, but she was attractive enough really, and it wasn’t like I was overwhelmed with better options. I had avoided her, simply because I didn’t really know what to say to her. I hadn’t the foggiest idea. My Achilles heel with the opposite sex was always a tendency to completely dry up whenever there was any chance they might have been interested in me. Only the most persistent of girls had ever really bothered to put up with my verbal constipation, so all previous romantic entanglements had been with rather pushy girls, who gave me very clear instructions on how I should behave. And even they usually got fed up with me. That I’d ever had any success with any girls was solely down to the fact that my shyness evaporated with a significant application of alcohol, which is where Cheryl and I had come in.

  ‘So how are you,’ she continued.

  ‘Alright,’ I grunted again.

  ‘So why haven’t you spoken to me since...’ she paused, ‘...you know.’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I mumbled.

  In fairness to Cheryl, she persisted longer than most girls would have done.

  ‘Do you even like me?’ she asked.

  I looked at her. To be fair she was really quite nice looking, and even though I was fairly sure we didn’t have a great deal in common, my somewhat hazy memories of the night we’d spent together, was far from unpleasant. Nonetheless, I wasn’t really sure what to reply so again reverted to my habitual grunt.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So are you going to ask me out then?’ she asked impatiently.

  ‘I suppose,’ I murmured, ‘I mean do you want to?’

  ‘Alright then,’ she obliged, ‘Where shall we go then?’

  ‘Drink?’ I ventured.

  ‘How original,’ she laughed, ‘you know how to show a girl a good time.’

  ‘Cinema?’ I tried, knowing that this wasn’t really much better.

  She walked slowly up to me and kissed me on the lips.

  ‘We’ll start with a drink shall we?’ she giggled, ‘and if things go well, maybe we’ll get as far as the cinema.’

  She walked away slightly provocatively, and for the second time in recent months I actually started to feel good about myself.

  I turned back to the coffee machine and ordered another twelve, to prepare me for my return to the phones.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be working in CFT today,’ said an angry voice behind me.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, just going,’ I replied slightly disrespectfully and wandered away leaving Grant glowering in the coffee room.

  I was fairly sure Grant would find a way of making me pay for that, but I was too happy to really care.