Your Call Is Important To Us

by Penny, Laura

  Of course, many of us have already told her exactly what to do, and where to go, while languishing for seemingly interminable periods listening to lickspittle from the Lady Hal. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard her intone the phrases, “We are experiencing higher than usual call volumes,” “Your call will be answered in priority sequence,” and the Big Lie, “Your call is important to us,” I wouldn’t be writing this book. I’d be charging admission and selling snacks at my fabulous roadside attraction, Nickel Mountain. When you are waiting on hold, all the things you have been promised as a customer go out the window. You are not always right, and you are no king. You are just another cluster of digits in the priority sequence.

  The factory-floor model of labor, where unskilled persons perform repetitive tasks repeatedly, works fine if you’re drilling some holes or welding a chassis. It does not work so well when the task is to explain to a consumer why their computer is having seizures, or to track a series of payments through a digital labyrinth. Your bank, or airline, or cable company provides a complex array of services, each with its own set of codes and prohibitions and prices, all stored on legions of computers, manned by many fallible individuals. A million things can go wrong, and they do. But when you try to rectify your problems, insult is added to injury. Most businesses do not hire enough front-line customer service personnel, so you have to suffer infuriating wait times. Then, once you finally get to speak to someone, he or she simply does not have the expertise, or the incentive, or the authority to fix your problem. Should your request be beyond the bounds of the CSR’s limited powers, the next step is to transfer you to another department, which may be in an entirely different call center, and may involve waiting in another priority sequence. Or, your CSR can call for a supervisor. In call center lingo, they call the call for a supervisor “escalation.” Escalation is discouraged, since there are generally far fewer supervisors than there are employees. Industry figures put the ratio at about ten employees per supervisor, but my anecdotal survey suggests this is a generous estimate. This is why, when you ask an unhelpful employee to transfer you to a supervisor, you go back into the holding pattern for a while. And even though you can’t hear them, behind the wall of Muzak and the stylings of the Lady Hal, they can always hear you, swearing and sputtering.

  Call centers don’t have to be voice-mail hells. There are some that boast high customer satisfaction ratings, and they share a few common traits, all of which make perfect sense. First, good call centers spend time training their people, so they are informed about the services their companies provide. Second, they hire more personnel, which cuts down on annoying wait times and encourages workers to spend more time with each customer. Third, they pay their workers better and offer opportunities for promotion. But all this costs money that companies would prefer to spend elsewhere, like on their advertising, say.

  This is another of the problems with service today, the great honking oversell of advertising. A doctrine that decrees that one is always right is a doctrine that is bound to disappoint. Companies pitch some serious woo when they’re trying to build a relationship with you. Throughout the balmy boom, companies promised us the moon. The new technology was going to make every transaction as easy as clicking a mouse, or phoning it in. Unfortunately, the technology still needs lots of people to run it, labor that big companies are not willing to pay for. Throughout the nineties, despite all the technological improvements in the service industry, customer satisfaction fell. According to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, a study conducted by the University of Michigan, it slid downhill from 1994, when the survey started, till 1998. Customer satisfaction levels bounced up and down around the turn of the millennium, but then September 11 made shopping a patriotic imperative and the scores rose, borne aloft by zero percent financing. However, the most recent estimates from the ACSI, for the last quarter of 2004, show customer satisfaction levels at a record low, dropping to a score of 73.6 out of 100.

  This wasn’t a huge decline. Customer satisfaction scores have been around 75 points for the duration of the study. That’s only a C. And this study is funded by the industries it analyzes, so one would expect it to skew in their favor. Moreover, some behemoths didn’t do nearly as well as you might expect them to do. Wal-Mart’s been on the slippity-slide since the survey started, from a score of 80 in 1994 to their latest score, 70, for the fourth quarter of 2004. McDonald’s scored a 63 in 1994, and it has bounced around the low sixties and high fifties ever since. The most recent quarterly figures, from 2003, put Mickey D’s at 64, comparable to the hated airlines. People don’t go to these places for the service. What kind of service do McDonald’s employees or Wal-Mart workers perform? It’s pretty much the bare minimum. They heat stuff up and hand it to you, or they get things off the shelf and ring them in. The best-ranked company on the survey, with a score of 84, was e-tailer Amazon.com, a company where all the workers are totally invisible. You simply serve yourself online, in the comfort of your home, and the products just show up at your door. Poof! No interactions with fumbling, diffident employees, just a hit of straight-up commerce, quick and sure and pure.

  The computer has allowed companies like Amazon to customize customer service, but not always in a good way. In keeping with the old business chestnut that 80 percent of the profits come from 20 percent of the customers, service is becoming increasingly stratified according to income. Better data collection means that companies are better able to engage in financial profiling. Computers make it easier for companies to figure out exactly how much it costs them to help you, and exactly how much your business is worth to them. As an article in BusinessWeek put it, a tad melodramatically, “Welcome to the new consumer apartheid.” One bank grades all its customers with a color code that pops up whenever they call; greens are the big spenders, reds the losers, and yellows the in-betweeners. The CSRs tailor the transaction accordingly. If you’re poor, you can expect the same serve-yourself model that prevails at Wal-Mart. If you’re a high roller, you can expect premium service: Your call is important to them.

  We may kvetch about the decline of old-school, hands-on, informed service, but when we shop, we consistently opt for the quick and the cheap. Consequently, most service sucks because serving people sucks. Why do a good job if you don’t have a good job? The top ten jobs are the top ten jobs in part because most of them have high turnover rates; they’re gigs that people leave in months, not years. Most people drift from call centers to big-boxes to fast-food joints. They feel no loyalty to or compunctions about their ginormous, distant employers, and it shows. Even Henry Ford figured out that you had to pay your workers enough to afford the things they produced in order to run a sustainable business, a lesson lost on most service and retail employers. And yet, in spite of all these glum stats about poorly paid workers delivering C-level service, and households maintaining their right to buy via mounting debt loads, free-marketeers insist that this is the system that works, the one thing that satisfies our wants and needs. The market isn’t just the best economic system, though it’s certainly that, by leaps and bounds, like a Porsche is better than a splintery old oxcart. No, marketeers go on and on and on as if all this buying and selling is the sole feat of human organization functioning as it should, and use the market as the benchmark for other services, like government, schools, and hospitals. You are no longer a citizen, a student, or a patient; you’re a customer. Hooray, everyone is number one! What a load of steaming number two.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

  —A.J. LIEBLING

  I am a news junkie. When I was young, I dreamed of being a dashing, righteous foreign correspondent, à la Christiane Amanpour. I imagined speaking truth to power from war-torn wherever. I even enrolled in journalism school. After a term, I realized I hated interviewing people. I didn’t like writing in industry-standard inverted pyramids. I didn’t like leaving the house, let alone jetting off to still-sizzling, re
cently wrecked locales. I excelled at lying on my couch in my pajamas reading long, boring things and writing short, amusing things, so I changed majors, and became a professional nerd. But I never lost J-school habits like reading a couple of papers and watching the news every day. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet have brought me hours—nay, years—of wonkish pleasure. Consequently, it pains me to take my beloved free press to task. But I chide and chastise because I care, and because the media are such an important part of the bullshit pandemic. The media are a critical line of defense against, and a great disseminator of, bullshit. They have the power to make shit up, let shit slide, or make sure that the shit hits the fan.

  A variety of vocal constituencies think that the Main Stream Media (MSM) are full of shit. Right-wingers accuse the media of liberal bias. Liberals accuse the media of being shills for Bush and big business. Old-school, retired journalists have written a number of books arguing that the profession is in dire straits. A number of scandals, in particular the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair imbroglios, gave the media the opportunity to hate the media, and engage in many column inches of anxious self-examination. Bloggers of both political persuasions have debunked or scooped MSM stories, and have made incursions into MSM domains like political conventions. Hell, even the president disdains the media. When a reporter asked Bush which news outlets he preferred, he replied that he didn’t really care for any of them. He doesn’t bother with the distortions of the press. He has people he trusts to tell him what is going on.

  Even people who are in the news every day can’t be arsed with the news anymore.

  Public trust in the media has been declining for the past twenty years, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Their 2004 report on the state of American journalism is full of grim stats. Only 49 percent of the respondents in their study thought the press was professional, down from 72 percent in 1985. And 36 percent thought the press was actively immoral, while 67 percent thought the press try to cover up their mistakes. Twenty years ago, 55 percent figured the press had their facts straight; now only 35 percent believe this.

  There was, however, a brief period within recent memory when these trends reversed, and the public trusted the press again, if only for a couple of months. After September 11, ratings for the news and approval ratings for the media soared. The disaster inspired many in the media to declare the end of the rule of the frivolous and the scandalous. Before September 11, the media spent the summer gabbing about Gary Condit and sharks. After September 11, the Gary Condit story became the standard example of the kind of sensationalistic, tawdry tale that the media would no longer stoop to tell. Media culpa, media culpa, media maxima culpa, cried the press corps, beating their breasts and packing their bags for some old-school front-line reportage, live from foreign hellholes. From here on in, it was just the facts, ma’am. No more sleaze and fluff, like Condit and sharks. We were going to get real news, war news, hard news.

  Hard news is news about public policy issues and foreign affairs, and it’s the kind of news that has been on the wane lo these past twenty years. In the seventies, foreign affairs coverage made up about 45 percent of TV news. As of 1995, that was down to a trifling 14 percent. Even during January 2002, when the War on Terror was shifting from Afghanistan to Iraq, foreign affairs coverage only made up about 21 percent of the nightly news, and less than 1 percent of the morning news. Moreover, that coverage tended to be disaster coverage, simply delivering the death tolls for the latest Israeli/Palestinian skirmish or Third World famine, earthquake, or drought, rather than explaining what was up with the rest of the world. By 2002, people had drifted away from coverage of international events, since they lacked the background to understand the stories, felt they were too far away to be relevant to them, or had tired of talk of war and violence.

  News outlets, from broadcasts to broadsheets, have increasingly favored soft news over hard news. Soft news is all that fluff that has nothing to do with foreign affairs or public policy. Celebrity reportage, human interest profiles, and scandal reporting have ballooned and floated from gossip columns to the news proper. Crime reporting has more than doubled since the eighties, even though the overall crime rate has steadily declined. The time devoted to human interest stories, and the lifestyle and consumer reporting that falls under the category of “news you can use,” has also more than doubled. The vocabulary of journalism has changed, too, with a shift in emphasis from the collective nouns of hard news to increased usage of personal pronouns.

  At the same time that the coverage has skewed from hard to soft, the way people get their news has changed as well. Broadcast journalism has continued to trounce the grimy old newspaper as most people’s primary source of information. Only 42 percent of the Americans who follow the news do so by reading a paper. Almost twice as many people, 83 percent, watch TV news. But broadcast news has changed, too. It is no longer the exclusive province of the stodgy old nightly newscasts on the big three U.S. networks. CNN, founded in 1980, inaugurated a whole spectrum of cable news networks, providing round-the-clock coverage. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a decade ago 60 percent of viewers used to tune in to one of the big three nightly newscasts. Now less than a third of the audience gets their news from CBS, ABC, and NBC. Cable news claims a third of the audience, and most of those people are watching CNN or Fox News, which are locked in a bitter struggle for ratings supremacy. I will get to this battle of the 24–7 news titans in a few pages, but first, let’s look at why the news has gotten all squidgy on us.

  Hard news isn’t cheap. It’s much less expensive to cover the latest Beltway indignity or Hollywood murder than it is to schlep a crew to war-torn wherever, or fund a time-consuming, potentially litigation-inducing series of investigative reports. The switch to soft news is also an attempt to improve ratings and please advertisers. This drive to cut costs while improving ratings is a significant shift in the way networks think about the news. In the heyday of the big three, the nightly news was seen as a sort of public service. ABC, CBS, and NBC have never been charities, but they saw their nightly newscasts as an obligation, a way of saying thanks for all the free airwaves granted to them by the FCC. Legendary CBS chief William Paley told his news division not to worry about making money. That wasn’t their job. They had stars like Jack Benny to make the money.

  Today the news is a moneymaking enterprise, a product that, like all the others, is expected to produce perpetual profit. The news has become just another part of the wonderful world of content. Content is the buzzword for all the media products people consume, from blockbuster movies to best-selling books to hit singles to Web portals to your news. The term content provider was originally an Internet term, but now everyone from the aged hosts of 60 Minutes to the latest prepubescent novelty rapper is a content provider. And the term content has become popular because media companies have become more consolidated, with fewer players selling more entertainment, information, and infotainment, and, let us not forget, copious quantities of advertainment. The only way to explain those madly diversified holdings is to lump ’em all under a term like content, as though books and music and news and movies were of a piece, information units to be marketed and moved.

  In 1984, there were more than fifty companies in the U.S. that held a controlling interest in newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, and book and magazine publishers. By 2002, that number was down to less than a dozen. Media theorist Ben Bagdikian estimates that the number of companies controlling the global media is somewhere between twenty and six, the big six being AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, News Corp, Vivendi, Viacom, and Disney. If I wanted to bulk up my relatively modest volume, and make it nice and hefty like an edition of Proust, I could spend pages galore just listing the media products produced by these six companies. The big six own pretty much every set of letters in the alphabet soup of broadcasting, like CNN, TBS, WB, AOL, BMG, RCA, FOX, MTV, CBS, and ABC, to name but a few.
Suffice it to say that if you live on this planet, and have ever turned on your TV, read a magazine or book, or enjoyed pop culture in any form whatsoever, you have beheld the mighty works of the big six. Six! Their respective CEOs could hold an evil cabal in the cozy confines of a minivan.

  We may have more channels than ever before, but centralized ownership, by a handful of companies, means more of what they like to call synergy and cross-promotion. And more synergy and cross-promotion means samey-style blobbiness, entertainment in your news, and news in your entertainment. Screwy bran-and-jujubes combinations ensue, and the next thing you know, a divertissement like Survivor turns up on the morning news and in the paper. And then blockbuster schlockmeister Jerry Bruckheimer starts talking to ABC about producing a mini-series about the War on Terror. Or you get absurdities like Saving Private Jessica, the movie, like the news story wasn’t a movie to begin with. The news has become more like entertainment, with fast editing, flashier graphics, and prettier people. Meanwhile, entertainment wraps itself in the gravitas of news. Box-office totals for weekend movie openings are now a standard news item. Every major network has at least one prime-time newsmagazine, which features extended coverage of gruesome crimes or amazing trials, intimate chinwags with the stars, and exposés of the horrors lurking in your own home, alarmist shit like “Bath Towels: The Fluffy Killer!” Then there are all those shows like Entertainment Tonight and Extra, the news’ dimwitted, hyper little sisters, squealing at shiny people. ET was a flop at first, until a passing news director told the producers to sell it as news. Didn’t matter if it was just publicity—which is all celeb coverage is—so long as it looked like news. 20/20 suffered from similar wobbly ratings early on, until an ABC vice president offered the one-word suggestion that saved the fledgling newsmagazine: entertainment.