those who were seen dancing

I'm on hold waiting for someone at Expedia to talk to me. You know those "for quality assurance purposes, this call may be monitored or recorded" messages?

When I worked in customer service on the phone a million and a half years ago, it always felt like that was a license to spy on me. Well, it's not. What it actually is is an opportunity for people like me who create stuff that, way down the line, gets used by my colleagues on the phone, to understand just how complicated customer service is and how badly the 'simple' things we want people to do work out in the end when we aren't vigilant about communication, training & support for those colleagues.

I know some of you are phone workers, and I thought you might appreciate that. Line management in a call center is rarely even aware of the forces that create change to what they do, but the people behind those forces listen to calls and realize just how much they fail to help to folks on the phone. Call monitoring isn't about how well phone folk do their jobs (although there are a million other monitoring tools that are supposed to do that - like those stupid "how fast did you get them off the phone" metrics); it's about how well a company is doing its job.

Of course, what would be ideal is if we structured phone work in a way that emphasized craft, so phone workers could tell us about these problems and work with us to solve them directly. I know people (including phone workers) tend to think of customer service as repetitive drudgery, but I think you could change the things you measure people on from just cost-based (did you get off the phone, how many calls did you take, what did you sell) to primarily service-based (how did you solve something, what corporate problems have you found) and change their perspective on the work like that. Yes, I do I live in a utopian world of imagination where work is concerned, thankyouverymuch.

By the way, the Expedia representative was just lovely, and it turns out that the most viable option is to cancel the current Hawai'i trip entirely and plan a new one later, not in August. Never try to book a hotel (or an effing flight - what, $900??!!) last minute in an island state during the summer.