We moved house recently. Our broadband ISP Pipex was among all the utilities that needed to be transferred. A sorry tale of customer dis-service followed.
It transpires that they have outsourced credit control in Lithuania, billing in the Philippines and Cancellations in the UK. All of these departments operate independently and are unable to transfer calls to the right department. Their IT systems appear to be unavailable on 50% of calls. They are unable to accept responsibility for sorting out a problem with a customer. The system is engineered to prevent customer satisfaction!
Grrrr!
There are issues here with outsourcing – I am guessing that each location may be run by a different subcontractor. Are any of the staff really interested in serving Pipex’s customers or are they just doing a job without any effort over and above turning up for work and jumping through the normal call centre performance hoops? The fact that several of the call centres are offshore tells me that they may be keener on cutting costs than anything else.
I drive at 30mph if I’m in an urban zone. I don’t drive at 20mph which might be safer or 40mph which would be more dangerous. Effectively I let the government set a safe limit and I stick to it. I don’t exercise a great deal of judgment and, so far, the arrangement has worked well. I do, however keep my eyes open and slow down if it snows or if it’s school time and there are children about.
International regulators of banks have set up similar rules which govern lending practice and institutions such as Northern Rock have responded by delegating the decision, about how much to lend, to the regulators and have lent as much as they possibly could even if it meant handing out cash to people with poor credit histories using inadequate collateral as security. Operating at the limits regardless of conditions can be reckless if no judgment is exercised.
This is another downside to government intervention that has combined with excessive stability to produce the biggest bubble in money supply that we have seen so far.
The financial system is unravelling at the moment. Northern Rock, a bank that specialises in mortgage lending, has come unstuck as it got caught between a wholesale finance market that is reviewing its attitude to risk following the sub-prime scandals in the US and its own sub-prime lending. Nobody wants to lend money to the bank any more and the Bank of England has stepped in as the lender of last resort. If the bank’s assets are really valuable then a buyer should be easy to find but it looks as though the latest property bubble market is bursting and Northern Rock’s willingness to lend up to 130% of the value of the house (sic) will leave it with a great potential for repossessions that will write off a few millions of its assets.
The Council for Mortgage Lenders has some interesting stats on repossession trends and lending standards that look alarming to me.
If 0.2% of mortgages are repossessed each year and an average mortgage lasts for 10 years then I calculate that we have a 2% chance of any given mortgage being repossessed.
If I have 50 friends then what chance do I have of knowing someone who has been repossessed?
If a lot of people know someone that has been repossessed then what confidence is there in the market about prices?
Just read Peters and Waterman’s In search of Excellence (1982). Just starting to read Small is Beautiful (1973) by E F Schumacher. Reading two Very Important Books close together can lead to extra insights or different points of view that can be thought (and behaviour) provoking.
#1 What if Schumacher had lived for 25 years after his book was published and Peters had not? (I don’t mean any ill will to TP who is a very clever guy with some very good messages).
#2 Schumacher’s messages call the game into question while ISOE explains how to play the game to the best effect and the greatest humanity. Small is Beautiful is quoted positively in ISOE and both seek to promote humanity.
We can now look on both with hindsight that tells us how successful US companies have been in promoting their view and how ’successful’ we have all been in using up the Earth’s finite resources.
Perhaps we should regard the faltering US car industry as a sign of hope that people have had enough of this ‘progress’ and that it’s time for a new approach – or a re-kindling or Schumacher’s call to recognise that there may be limits to what we should have.
Do stuff that your customer will be grateful for
Sell the things that your customer will be proud to own
Make things that you can be proud of
