Clarissa Bye: The art of answering the phone and good customer service seems a thing of the past

When technology takes over, and there are fewer human beings left to answer their phones, never mind give you good customer service, what are we to do, writes Clarissa Bye.

When I was growing up, the ring on our home phone was so loud you could hear it from every room in the house. Even in the garden.

My brothers and I would run to ­answer it, elbowing each other out of the way in the race to find out who was calling.

Usually it was our grandmother or an aunty. Or a friend.

ABBA wasn’t joking when they sang: “Ring Ring, the happiest sound of them all.”

Now nobody answers their phones.

Not big companies, online shops, not Qantas, the Government or even my own kids. Especially my children.

Noone answers their phones anymore, not even major companies, writes Clarissa Bye.

They’ll respond with a tentative text message after a respectable ­period of time – “did you call?” Or the even more annoying “?”.

Like hell yes, answer your phone.

They say Millennials and Generation Y have a fear of the phone and actually regard unannounced calls as verging on rude.

Randomly calling out of the blue for a chat is unthinkable.

I’m getting just as bad these days, as my husband will attest, but now it’s official.

This week, telco regulator ACMA kicked off a new campaign that literally says – if you don’t know who’s calling, don’t answer.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has a campaign telling people not to answer their phones if they don’t know who is calling. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

The scammers and spammers have ruined a perfectly good system of answering the phone.

At least my children get back to me.

More and more it’s starting to feel rather like us consumers have fallen into a dystopian black hole, where there’s no one around to answer our calls for help anymore.

When this subject is raised with friends and family, everyone has a horror story.

The reciting of the backstory – nightmarish dealings with utility companies, online retailers, telcos or governments – goes on for so long, and is so Kafkaesque, you give up trying to make any sense of it and just nod along.

I laughed to read The Daily Telegraph story recently that the genii at the Department of Foreign Affairs had finally found a solution to farcical queues of people waiting outside their Haymarket passport offices.

They hired workers to answer the phones and emails.

“ … thereby eliminating the need to stand for hours and hours at chilly Henry Deane Plaza,” my colleague John Rolfe explained.

Then there are the thousands of passengers engaged in a prolonged torture session of getting Qantas to answer the phone.

The giant company sacked thousands of staff and now can’t deal with all the lost baggage, cancelled flights and disruptions.

People wanting refunds of thousands of dollars have spent months being put on hold for up to seven hours at  a time – longer than a trip to Perth.

One of my usually composed daughters in her early 20s broke down and wept at the airport counter in Dublin a few weeks back after getting caught up in travel chaos.

She wasn’t able to talk to a live human about her tickets, as everything is organised on apps and online, and missed the connecting flight.

Government agencies are just as bad. Someone I know rang the NSW Sheriff’s office about their jury duty notice and lasted two hours on hold before giving up.

I was caught in a death spiral of pressing the wrong buttons on a call to a government agency recently and was hung up on four times before I hit the jackpot combination of winning buttons.

Technology was supposed to help make our lives easier. It’s given us much more convenience but, when it goes wrong, it’s diabolic.

Why isn’t it seamless yet?

One of the nation’s deepest thinkers about society, prosperity and creativity, Professor Peter Murphy, has written a book called Auto Industrialism: DIY Capitalism and the Rise of the Auto Industrial Society.

He says we’re at the end of post-­industrialism and are now entering a “momentous structural change,” an auto-industrial age where technology replaces even more human labour.

Since the 1970s we’ve been living through a massive ballooning of the bureaucratic, health, education and welfare state, a lot of which will be ­automated.

Household-based work will grow “electronic cottage style” with more self-employed and entrepreneurial workers.

More jobs will be problem-solving. “A machine cannot solve problems,” he says. “Problem solving requires us to do imaginative things that ­machines cannot do, such as change perspective on a problem.”

I think companies and governments have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We’re in a transitional stage where they think they can cut staff by computerising things but we’re not there yet.

As I’m writing this, my mobile rings with an unknown number. Do I take the official advice and ignore it? I ignore their advice instead and press the green button.

People in line at the Sydney Passport Office waiting for information about their passport. Picture: Jonathan Ng

It’s an urgent query from Snow goose Gift Hampers – did I order a fruit and chocolate hamper for a ­patient at the Mater Hospital?

Yes, I reply. The courier is there right now but the hospital says the ­patient does not exist.

My mum and I had ordered it for my aunt having a hip operation. We discover she was moved that morning to a rehab hospital.

Having recently suffered a courier issue with Australia Post, with no ­listed phone numbers or way of fixing, I thought we’d lost the money we spent.

But no, the helpful man organised to redirect the courier and didn’t charge us.

The on-the-ball small business ­entrepreneur solved the problem ­efficiently. Big government and big corporates need to take heed.