Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Solving Britain's unemployment problems

Here is my contribution to solving UK's rising unemployment which stands at 7.8 per cent of the population at the moment and is predicted to rise to 9.5 per cent in two years. Gordon Brown should make it illegal for service companies to use any kind of automated voice recordings. No company should ask its clients to speak to automated voice services to pay for bills, send details about addresses or changes in them, or any other inquiries.

We just moved out of our old place and I had to go through an immensely long and frustrating exercise to get my address changed and outstanding bills cleared off with government councils, gas, water and electric companies. All of them forced me to speak to automated voice services. None of these enlightening conversations eventually worked out because either the automated voice couldn't understand my accent or because I didn't read out the addres exactly as it had on its records or whatever. So I was passed on real operators eventually anyway. But not before I had already wasted much time and patience over delightful chats with machines.

It is poor service, it wastes my time - and most importantly, it is taking away some poor unemployed British sods job. Get rid of it!

2 comments:

jaimit said...

great... more outsourcing business for India....yipeee yay yay..
and we still wont understand accents

globalbabble said...

Giggle.. I guess so. A friend from Delhi who is also living in London called up her Citibak India helpline, and the phone assistant from Chennai couldn't understand her Delhi accent!

I thought the anecdote was priceless.