An hour and a half’s wait and all I had to show for it was the dialling tone.There is something humiliating and dehumanising about these experiences. Then, as the problem remained unresolved, my new friend Darren rang. He gave me his name, his direct line to call throughout the techno-nightmare, and occasionally checked the engineer’s progress.By contrast, AOL sent me into the call-centre hell which will be familiar to many. In the past, they have both told me how important I am to them, frequently writing or ringing me to encourage me to make a deeper commitment to them, but, as is so often the case, it has been when things have gone wrong that the truth behind the warm words has been revealed.Of the technology, it is necessary only to know that neither my silenced phone nor my internet difficulty was my fault.

When eventually I reached someone, we discovered that my problem could only be resolved by someone at Level Two. I rang, waited and waited, marvelling several times at the fact that Bert Jansch’s 1960’s folk classic “Strollin’ Down the Highway” was among the songs being techno-busked to those in the queue. “Companies need to make quality service a priority and take steps to provide good, consistent and timely service in a bid to increase loyalty and reduce churn.”No one has been in greater need of churn-reduction than I have over recent days while trying to deal with the two gigantic organisations, BT and AOL, who have a stranglehold not only over my work and my social life, but also on my sanity. After the visit of five engineers, the BT problem was finally resolved by an electrician.

I should be annoyed, yet I have to admit that I am surprisingly unchurned.The BT call centre rings back rather than requiring me to queue. That simple expression of respect for my time made me almost weep with gratitude. “The research clearly indicates what customers do and don’t like,” a bright-spark from a company known as Callmedia has commented. E-mails from and to me were mysteriously disappearing into cyberspace.
And so, as a result of these fairly typical travails, Darren and Jim have become part of my life, and I have begun to understand the profound frustration and dissatisfaction with our call-centre culture which has just been revealed in a YouGov survey.