An entrepreneur even set up a website,, revealing which keys to press to bypass option menus. "You don't know you've taken the wrong path until it's too late." Customers rebelled, hammering zero to speak to a real person. "Like everyone, I hate push-button options," says Wood. Number pressing, of course, came to be seen as special torture. "We were all supposed to be redundant!" Millard reminded her audience: robots were meant to be answering the phones, customers plinking in their complaints and queries via a telephone keypad. At the Birmingham Expo I'd listened to Nicola Millard, a call-centre wiz from BT, speak about the era of self service that everybody expected would be in place around 2008. "Lack of human contact" was a major woe – actually a calculated move by industry innovators looking to slim call times (and staff costs) through automation. A survey by the Citizens Advice Bureau in 2004 revealed that 97% of call-centre customers had had cause to complain. Somewhere in its 25-year lifespan, admits Peter Wood, now the head of esure insurance, "the phrase 'call centre' came to have all sorts of associations for people, often bad".
By the mid-1990s this cost-reducing method of managing inbound and outbound calls was a business standard, the industry, by the mid-2000s, one of the fastest-growing in the UK. His 63-man centre in Croydon was followed, in 1988, by a First Direct centre in Leeds, a location chosen because of the pleasant lilt of the local workforce. When did the idea ever get lost?Ĭall centres as we know them – banks of agents, "press 21 if your surname contains a double consonant" – first appeared in Britain in 1985, when the businessman Peter Wood founded the telephone-based insurance company Direct Line. Unusual circumstances, but the personal touch did the trick and Sugar's tropical fury was assuaged. Lord Sugar, after his Twitter rant, got an apology call from BT chairman Ian Livingston. It is a rousing address, and seems to sum up a prevailing theme at the Expo, with its wall of honesty, its self-flagellating seminars: that it's time for the industry to rediscover its humanity. Peppers bemoans rudeness, inattention, ending with a stark warning to his audience of call-centre bods: "Remember that customers have memories. I stop in at "Press One To Get Lost", a 45-minute oration by a consultant called Don Peppers who rails at the culture of pass-the-potato phonecalls and the fact that two-thirds of UK customers think service levels have plummeted in the past three years. For now, guests are invited to sit in on talks in the hall's various lecture spaces: "My Call Centre Doesn't Understand Me", "Press One To Get Lost", "Hello Mr Bond We've Been Expecting You (The True Value of Voice)", "Tenacity! Selecting The Right People To Work In A Call Centre".
Later in the evening, I have seen advertised, the European Call Centre of the Year awards will be staged in a neighbouring hotel. A consultancy firm has erected a "wall of honesty", asking visitors to confess to past sins like hazy option menus, or neglect. Men on podiums have imaginary conversations into futuristic headsets. Thousands of insiders gather here every year to tour the hangar-like space, sharing advice and innovations, selling each other products and worrying about an industry that has gone through some juddering changes in its short lifespan. Keen to find out more about this industry that employs more than a million Britons, so often a source of anguish for the remainder, I am at the Call Centre Expo in Birmingham's NEC Arena. How much do we really know about them? "More people have worked in call centres than ever worked in the mining industry," says the writer Matt Thorne, a former operator who wrote a novel, Eight Minutes Idle, about his experiences, "yet it's an occupation that has a relatively low public profile."
Uniquely irritating, call centres are unavoidable in modern life: the gateway to household-bill or working-boiler or hard-shoulder rescue, even (from this month) an appointment with the local doctor – at least in places like Manchester and Milton Keynes where bookings at 50 general practices are to be grouped under a remote call-centre booking system.