【英语生活】让电话见鬼去吧！

I punched in a London number and far away in Singapore the phone rang twice.

“This is Bloomberg, the home of customer service, innovation and creativity,” said a recorded voice. “Please stand by and listen to one of our seven global television channels whilst we find you a service genius.”

So I stood by and after a few more rings a service genius picked up the phone.

“Bloomberg, this is Mark. How may I help you?”

“Hello, Mark,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask how you feel about being called a service genius?”

There was a pause.

“I'm sorry?” he said.

I explained about the recorded message.

“Are you asking me?”

I confirmed that I was. And he had a little think and said: “I suppose I feel neutral about it.”

He thought some more and offered this theory: “It is our job to address customers' queries to the best of our abilities.”

Mark is a genius after all. He has stumbled on a truth that most people who run call centres, including his own employers, have forgotten. For all the hubris, oxymorons and utter twaddle of its recorded message, Bloomberg hasn't noticed that the point of employing people at the end of phones is to supply good answers to the people who ring in.

Doing this, however, seems to be unbelievably difficult. Last week I watched Phone Rage, a Channel 4 documentary about call centres. It is mass warfare out there: frustrated, shouty customers pitched against young people in headphones earning meagre salaries and mostly failing to keep the boredom from their voices.

“F***ing British Telecom!” yells one angry customer. “I pay my f***ing bills so get off my f***ing line!!”

“I can empathise with you, sir,” a pallid young employee says blankly.

Behind the scenes companies go on making the same elementary mistakes: not having enough people to answer the telephones, giving them dumb scripts to read from, employing people whose English is difficult to understand, and repeatedly telling customers who are kept on hold that “your call is important to us”.

There has to be a better way – and there is. The documentary showed us the famously good First Direct call centre in Leeds, where happy staff lark around throwing softballs at each other while they shower customers with warm words like “need”, “want”, “like” and “love”. When callers have managed to supply three letters or numbers from their password, they are taught to say: “That's tremendous!”

As a loyal First Direct customer I can confirm that my calls are answered promptly, that staff are friendly and that I am always warmly congratulated every time I remember my memorable address.

Yet I have found a still better solution to the call centre problem: bypass them and use the internet instead. According to the documentary we each spend a day a year talking to call centres. This is a mad waste of time. All call centre staff do is input data into computers and so it makes every sense to cut out the weary middleman and type in the stuff yourself.

This means you never get put on hold. You are never told the 13 most annoying words in the English language: “Please listen carefully to ALL the following options before making a selection.” Instead you can click on a few options as carelessly as you like with no one bossing you about and get your answer faster.

Most beautifully, you don't have to talk to another person, which is stressful, invasive and not to be recommended. Talking to friends on the phone is nice but talking to people in call centres, no matter how cheery and upbeat their tone of voice, is not.

The only cases where call centres make sense are where complicated advice is needed, or when pushy selling is required – as service geniuses can be better than machines at getting us to part with our money. But otherwise, the telephone is increasingly unfit not just for call centres but for most other business purposes too.

When you talk to a stranger on the phone, you can't see them but you have to talk to them nicely. It is both intimate and alienating at the same time, which is a freaky combination. When I was a news reporter I found calling people traumatic, and still have to psych myself up before picking up the phone even to make a dental appointment.

By comparison, e-mail is quick and easy and appropriately impersonal. It is much derided for interrupting our work, but its interruptions are as nothing against the noisy, intrusive, brutal telephone.

As I write this, perfectly on cue, my phone rings and it is someone I barely know wanting to “pick my brains” on something. How dare you interrupt me, I thought. My rage was made worse by the new telephone I've been given that has a clock on it, so I can see just how long the call is taking. I spent 2 mins 43 seconds on that unwanted call. An e-mail would have taken about 10 seconds. The man would have written: “Do you know anything about X?” I would have e-mailed back: “No”.

Increasingly, though, my phone is silent, which might be because I am so bad with the people who do ring. However, I'm not taking it personally: I think it is because other people agree with me that the phone is becoming obsolete at work. Most mornings I get in and I have no phone messages at all, which is tremendous, as the First Direct staff would say.

我拨出一个伦敦的号码，电话铃在遥远的新加坡响了两次。

“这里是彭博社(Bloomberg)，客户服务、创新与创意之家，”一个电话录音声音说。“请稍候，并收听我们七大全球电视频道之一的节目，我们将为您找一个服务天才提供服务。”

于是，我就候在那里。电话铃又响几声之后，一个服务天才接起了电话。

“彭博社，我是马克。请问您需要什么帮助？”

“你好，马克，”我说。“我可不可以问一句，被人叫做服务天才，你作何感受？”

电话里出现了停顿。

“您说什么？”他说道。

我解释道，这么问是因为那段录音信息。

“您是问我吗？”

我说，我确实是在问他。于是他略微思考了一下，说道：“我想我没有特别的感受。”

他又想了想，然后说出了这么一个理论：“尽自己所能回答客户的疑问，是我们的职责。”

马克果然是个天才。他无意中发现了大多数呼叫中心运营者（包括他自己雇主在内）忘记的一个真理。从狂妄自大、前后矛盾、废话连篇的录音信息来看，彭博社并未注意到，雇人接电话这种行为的关键在于，要为打电话进来的人提供好的回答。

不过，做到这一点似乎困难得难以想象。前一阵子，我看了第四频道(Channel 4)一个关于呼叫中心的纪录片《电话怒火》(Phone Rage)。电话中就是一场大规模战争：失望的客户咆哮不已，对那些戴着耳机、收入微薄、声音中大多难以掩饰自己厌倦之意的年轻人大光其火。

“去他XX英国电信！”一个愤怒的客户喊道。“我他XX交了钱，所以他XX给我接线！”

一个毫无生气的年轻雇员没有任何感情色彩地说：“我能理解您的心情，先生。”

在这一幕的背后，各家公司还在犯同样的低级错误：接电话的人手不够，给他们愚蠢的稿子照着念，雇员的英语说得让人很难听懂，还一再告诉那些举着电话等候的客户“您的来电对我们很重要”。

应该有更好的方式才对——也确实有更好的方式。这部纪录片给我们展示了利兹一个著名的呼叫中心First Direct。在那里，愉快的员工互相投掷垒球、到处嬉戏玩乐。而他们对客户也丝毫不吝惜热情的字眼儿：例如“需要”、“想要”、“喜欢”、“爱”。当打电话的人成功提供了密码中的三个字母或数字时，他们还会说：“太好了！”

作为First Direct的忠实客户，我可以证明，我打过去的电话能迅速得到接听，员工态度友好，每次我说出我那本来就很好记的地址时，都会受到他们的热烈赞扬。

不过，我发现，要解决呼叫中心的问题，还有一个更好的方法：绕开呼叫中心，转而使用互联网。按照这部纪录片的说法，我们每个人每年有一天的时间会花在呼叫中心上。这真是对时间的惊人浪费。呼叫中心员工做的所有工作，只不过是把数据输入到电脑里，所以，完全可以取消这种疲倦的中间人，由你自己来把资料敲进电脑。

这样的话，你永远无须等电话。你永远不会听到以下这些极其烦人的字眼：“请仔细听好全部选项，然后再进行选择。”相反，你可以点击几个选项，怎么漫不经心都可以，没有人对你指手划脚，而且你还能更快地得到回答。

最美妙的是，你不用跟另一个人说话——跟这个人通话让人感到紧张、有攻击性，不建议你那么做。跟朋友通电话感觉很好，但跟呼叫中心的人通电话，无论他们的语调如何兴高采烈、乐观昂扬，也不是那么回事儿。

只有在需要复杂的建议，或者必须进行过度热情的推销之时，呼叫中心才有意义——因为在让我们掏腰包方面，服务天才肯定比机器做得更好。不过，从另一个方面来说，电话越来越不适宜了，不仅对呼叫中心是这样，对大多数其它商业目的也是如此。

当你跟一个陌生人通电话时，你看不到他们，却不得不跟他们和颜悦色地交谈。亲密与疏远同时存在，真是一对畸形的组合。我当记者的时候很怕给人打电话，直到现在，我拿起电话之前还要先做做精神准备，哪怕就是预约个牙医。

相比之下，电子邮件又快又容易，而且也不那么人格化。这种方式会打断我们的工作，因而备受嘲笑，不过，它那种打断总好过聒噪冒昧、粗暴无礼的电话。

就在我写这篇文章的时候，真是太巧了，我的电话铃响了，是一个我不太认识的人，想就某些问题“征求一下我的想法”。我心想，你竟敢打断我！由于别人给了我一部新电话，上面有一个钟表，我能看见电话打了多长时间，这让我更加来气。这个讨厌的电话花了我2分43秒。一封邮件也就需要10秒钟。这个人可以写：“你知道X的情况吗？”我可以回邮件说：“不知道。”

不过，我的电话越来越少了，也许是因为我对打来电话的人态度太差。然而，这也不是我一个人造成的：我认为，原因在于其他人也赞同我的观点，认为电话在工作中即将绝迹。大多数清晨，我打开电话，根本就没有电话留言。正如First Direct员工会说的那句话一样：“太好了！”

译者/徐柳