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Digital EditionWhy We’re All Moonlighting: The Hidden Cost of DIY Customer Service
Roger Crombie is a United Kingdom-based columnist for Risk & Insurance®. He can be reached at [email protected].
We are all full-time risk assessors. We analyze risk every waking second. It’s not a formal position, and not much training is available, yet the quality of our lives depends on us being consistently good at it.
Anything we do (or don’t do) contains an element of risk. Our main opportunity is to control frequency, since the severity often depends on external factors. Our jobs are our main occupation, with the risk assessment switch permanently engaged.
In our spare time, most of us are forced to moonlight in any number of other part-time positions, thanks in good measure to the internet.
We have become gas station attendants, pumping gas and getting our hands dirty checking oil and tire pressures. We are supermarket checkout clerks, sliding groceries across machines.
Simultaneously, we act as security officers, policing ourselves. Then we bag our groceries.
We are our own travel agents. We are airport check-in staff. We construct our own furniture. We sort our own trash. We are accountants, filling out 90-page tax forms. We are bankers, juggling our finances online.
In the UK, we have become our own doctors, since our actual doctors are too busy to see us.
Some of us are meter readers (now called data collectors) for the utilities supplied to our homes. For the past four years, those formally employed as data collectors have been working from their homes, where there isn’t much data to collect.
Since 1983, when the first office computer arrived, I’ve been my own IT department, as all of us are now. I’ve been my own secretary since the same time. It’s a shame, really: You can’t chase yourself around a desk (relax; it’s called humor).
Writing is the only paying gig I have. Everything else I apparently do is out of the goodness of my heart.
The successful transfer of unpaid work to every one of us Average Joes signals the death of customer service, now a quaint idea that once provided necessary jobs in almost every industry. Despite the fact that the largest countries are now referred to as service economies, “no-service economies” would be a more accurate term.
Boasting about the high quality of customer service every company says it offers, however, appears not to have faded in parallel with this massive job transfer.
What organization does not sing its own praises from the highest uplands while forcing the customer to provide — or go without — whatever level of service might be required?
It’s a double whammy. Not only have companies cut their costs by firing or failing to employ people, but they have also transferred to the taxpayer the cost of keeping the unemployed alive. It’s hard to imagine a more antisocial strategy.
Had prices fallen after I was given these jobs, I would have been less upset. “We pass the cost savings on to you” has become another of the great lies (Ikea excepted). Prices have risen inexorably, despite our doing much of the work. How is that a good idea for anyone other than the companies enforcing it?
That concludes my 250th column in this space.
Gotta go. I have a dozen other people’s jobs to do. &
