Automation is not beautiful

[peterbirks]

A repeat of something I posted on Facebook:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/08/united-airlines-lost-my-friends-10-year-old-daughter-and-didnt-care.html

Link to the above to read a salutary tale.

This is what happens when a company, and the system, is broken. UA won't bother to comment because I'm not NBC. But this is a set list of what dealing with big companies is like these days. Feelings of complete helplessness, despair and anger.

I had a far smaller example of this with Computershare.co.uk yesterday. My PIN would not work. I had to spend 15 minutes on the phone (an 0870 number) before I found out that the PINs "expire" after "three to six months". During the first call the man asked me for my name, then my address, then my date of birth, and then for my employer number. When I said that this was ridiculous in that I wasn't asking to be given access to the site or any confidential information, he said:
"This is just normal security procedure to protect you",
at which point I snapped and said "Bollocks, "this is ABnormal security procedure and it's to protect YOU, not me".
What Sutton says about UA is what applies to computershare.co.uk, BT, any bank, all utilities. The people who work there are fine enough, but the system instilled into them prevents them acting as human beings. There is a rule for everything and they have to follow it. Little wonder that improvised "helping" is blasted off the agenda.

We need a radical change to the system ooperated in big companies, one that realizes that "bigger profit" does not come from "automation" and depersonalization, from cutting costs to the bone and turning all staff into automatons. Companies that manage to get staff to take responsibility, to believe in themselves, and then get backed when they take a left-field decision to help a customer, are the companies that will make more money in the next decade. The companies hat use anything "automated" or an "IT advance" will become hated and reviled as social media becomes more powerful.

BT, UA, Facebook, the clock is ticking for you; all those companies where there are "real people who can make decisions" rather than hired employees who just follow what is directed at them from a computer screen, are going to grow in the next 20 years, and your wonderful IT-up-to-the-minute top-quality datametrics will be laughed into oblivion. Along with you. Remember Wang? Remember the word processor? Remember WordStar? That's you, that is.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Pete,
Whilst I'll agree with everything you write here I'm not as optimistic as you that the business world will change as the culture is too deeply embedded. It does strike a chord as I'm about to have a 2:1 with my line and department manager and the subject is the lack of nmanagement accountability which has permeated down to the lower levels and therefore I believe our service to the customer is suffering as a result. I don't blame the line employees - everybody drops into what I call "Survival Mode" - head down do job - fulfil your metrics and get out of the office asap. maybe I'm being overly pressimistic but the whole cult of "managerialism" out there is depersonalising the workplace. I know some smaller outfits are exceptions but I see this creeping into a number of our larger organisations that put on a different public face.

Only time will tell I feel.

John G

[slowjoe.livejournal.com]

I'm not as cheerful or optimistic as you, Pete. This is a problem that techies have been screaming about since at least the time that the year still ended in a 1. Professional systems administrators would froth at the mouth about being asked whether their computer was turned on when there was an outage at the ISP. The fact is, the ISP was taking school-leavers and giving them a trouble-shooting script. Much cheaper that someone educated to the point that they could trouble-shoot themselves.

I think it's a war now, between the "little" people like you and me on the one hand, and the bureaucracies on the other. It opened my eyes when I got a third diagnosis of my first episode of penicillin allergy at Whipps Cross, and no-one would tell the first two doctors that they had got it wrong. Had I not fought for a third diagnosis, I might be dead.

Think about that - the NHS nearly broke me rather than a guitar, and looked me in the eye and didn't care.

The fact is most organisations are going larger rather than smaller, and the most productive, innovative business approach seems to be the Ryanair one - price the problem (baggage) so that it goes away. When these interactions with bureaucracy are necessary, they are becoming MORE painful rather than less, and I don't see the nimble competitors that are supposed to take over. Google, which might be the great white hope in this area, is actually making things worse. They have programs making decisions, and no appeal process.

There's an expression - "going Postal" which refers to an innovative and unconventional way of dealing with HR problems at work. I anticipate that a similarly innovative and unconventional approach is necessary before places like United and BT and Google and whoever else respond. If ten million hits and a number one don't make a difference at United, what on earth might make it happen?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

It would indeed have been easy to be pessimistic, if not fatalistic, about the future. But since I'm known as a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I thought I would come up with a bit of a cri de coeur and try to get people to believe that the fight was not lost.

If anything is going to beat these ideas for business it's going to be bad PR. Eventually, I hope, a realization will come that less of a bean-counting quarter-by-quarter strategy and more of a long-term planning-for-the-future strategy is the best way to go. This may vary from business to business - the RyanAir strategy seems to be working, for the moment, but I for one have shifted BACK to British Airways.

All positive actions by larger companies should be publicized and praised. Customers should, please, stop focusing just on price. Surely in the end people will realize that TalkTalk can only sell at the price it charges because it is shit?

I'd also like to see less outsourcing where the outsourced deal with your customers. I think that this is the worst mistake of all, because as soon as you do that the retail customer is not the real customer of the person they deal with - the "real" customer is the outsourcer.

And I think that there is a place for legislation -- an end to any contract that runs for more than 12 months. No signing people up for cheap and then locking them in for 18 months or 24 months. Always make it so that the "end of the relationship" is an imminent threat if you really screw up the way you deal with the customer.

Can the little people win? I really think that they can, but only by fighting on new terms -- those are, using social media to ridicule the farcicality of bureacuracy, and trying to make stuff that shows them up "go viral". This, I hope, will eventually hit their bottom line and will also get institutional investors to question the strategy. When that is done, we should see a change.

PJ

[slowjoe.livejournal.com]

We are agreed on your idea - that or exit clauses.

However the "outsourcer-outsourcee" cognitive dissonance is most unlikely to be resolved in the good old UK because that is the model of the <hawk, spit> NHS. It is politically "brave" to be seen to be attacking the NHS, which is ultimately, the Government outsourcing healthcare to the NHS.

Personally, I think that there's a head of pressure building - the political class is on the wrong side of most arguments (immigration, budget deficit, QE, Europe, the financial crisis, the bailouts, low level criminality) and the three large parties don't actually offer any significant vehicle to express these problems. Actually, rather than a head of pressure - which would suggest the political system was being pushed, a better metaphor is a tinder box. One spark (and we've had two in the last decade, the fuel blockades and the riots) and the system will again face a predictable crisis.

[(Anonymous)]

Here in Liverpool I am somewhat worried by the termination of Virgin trains in favour of First Group (?) Virgin has improved the service greatly, cut journey times by a third and has always had great customer service. Seemingly investing in the future, is a dangerous game. It would appear they (the gov't) are selling to the highest bidder.

Ben
Liverpool

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I'm no lover of Virgin anything, but many people seem genuinely sad that Virgin has lost that train route. However, I think that your interpretation is correct. Just punt the lowest price. Not sure what one can say or do about that kind of thing.

PJ

[(Anonymous)]

I think the problem is many people cannot see how the service will be improved. we have had a company that invested in new rolling stock. The new one intends to limit catering by only using trolley sevices.
As you say ". Not sure what one can say or do about that kind of thing."

I think that is a problem.
How can we the consumers make a difference when we can see that the powers that be continually make such poor decisions at a local level.

Ben