Published: 3 Dec 2024.
by Gerry Gaffney
This story contains swearing.
Jennifer picked up a folder from the meeting room table, said "This is bullshit," and put it back down again. She used a pen to push it cautiously further away from her.
Her manager Gregory said "For God's sake, Jen, can you just hold your fire until we've at least had a look at it. You haven't even opened it, you can't just say it's bullshit."
"It says Marketing on the front. So it's from Marketing. It's directed at us. Therefore it's bullshit. Marketing needs to stick to their knitting. Do focus groups and advertisements and shit, and leave customer support to the people who know what they're doing."
She look at the others round the table. "Right?"
4 of them nodded, 1 looked noncommittal and Gregory glared at her.
"I can't believe you've torpedoed our meeting like this. Why are you even here Jennifer? Why do you bother coming to work?"
"The vibe, the people and, believe it or not, a strange desire to help our customers when they encounter problems."
"That's what we all want."
"That's not what Marketing wants. Marketing is just a self-serving machine that wants to sustain itself by sucking the blood out of the rest of the company. Marketing people just want to have projects and products that they can list on their CVs and portfolios and their LinkedIn profiles for when they move on to better-paying jobs in a never-ending cycle of cannibalism and destruction."
He stared at her. "Did you have a bad experience or something? A fraught relationship with a marketing person? Do you need counselling?"
The others were enjoying the interaction. Team meetings could be boring, but when Jennifer was on a roll they were usually entertaining.
"No relationship with any marketing person. Thank God and touch wood," she said, tapping the table twice with her fingertips.
She leaned back. "Look," she continued, sounding reasonable, "you know as well as I do what they're like. They'll have conducted some half-arsed research, followed it up with a bit of shallow analysis and created a list of proposed actions, some of which will affect us and which, if we adopt them, will almost certainly make us less efficient, less effective and more likely to be replaced by an AI. Tell me I'm wrong."
Gregory sighed. He looked around the room. 5 faces were looking at him with expectation and anticipation, and Jennifer was looking at him dispassionately.
"As your manager," he began. Everyone understood this to mean that the discussion was closed and the meeting was to proceed on its intended course. "As your manager, I ask that you all keep an open mind until we have at least looked at what Marketing are suggesting. Can we do that? Please?"
Nods.
"Okay." He opened his folder and the others opened theirs. Jennifer retrieved hers from where she'd slid it and opened it with exaggerated care, as if it were contaminated. She glanced at the contents and rolled her eyes so extravagantly that her teammates could almost hear them rotate in her skull.
Gregory had the accompanying slideshow. He displayed the opening slide on the wall screen.
"Improving customer perceptions of support team expertise," it read.
Jennifer groaned. Gregory ignored her and clicked to the next slide, entitled "Post- unsuccessful support calls: NPS findings."
Jennifer snorted.
Gregory stared at her. "Okay. What? You know, in the old days we could just fire people. It was great."
"You don't want to fire me. I'm too much fun. Also our team stats are stellar and you always make bonus."
Gregory put his face in his hands.
"I think I'll just go home. I don't need this aggravation in my life. I wanted to be a train driver but I got sucked into this."
"Listen," said Jennifer. "I really don't want to make life difficult. But for starters they're using Net Promoter Score, which is mostly bullshit. It's designed to be used on large randomised groups of customers. They're basing this on 27 answers - see, it says n=27. And they only asked people who didn't get a resolution to their technical problem, so it's both not random and a self-selected group. Right?"
Even Gregory nodded.
"Then they asked the usual How likely are you to recommend blah blah blah. Which doesn't make sense. If we didn't fix your problem, how likely are you to recommend us to your family and friends? It's just nonsense to ask people questions like that.
"So we're already in fairyland. But wait, there's more! It looks like they asked some additional questions. This should be enlightening. I presume they're on the next slide?"
Gregory clicked to the next slide.
"Yep," said Jennifer, "here we go. Three statements. The first two are so stupid and pointless they're not even worth reading. The last one - The support staff were knowledgeable and helpful, agree disagree or neutral - is just awful. For starters, it's actually two questions. One about whether they - we - are knowledgeable and one about whether we are helpful. If we didn't fix the problem then we were not helpful, pretty much by definition. And if we couldn't fix the problem we were probably not knowledgeable. I haven't seen the pretty pictures yet. Presumably they're coming up?"
Gregory clicked forward without comment.
"Here we go, nice pie charts. 3D, lovely. So 81.5% agreed with the statement that we're not knowledgeable and/or helpful, 14.8% disagreed and 3.7% didn't know."
She laughed. "3.7%, if you work it out, is 1 person. Statistics are great. I wonder how much they spent on this whole exercise? What a waste of time and effort."
Gregory was looking at her. He seemed glum. "Can I go on to the recommendations?"
"I can hardly wait."
He clicked.
For a moment they were quiet as they read. Someone started to laugh and the others joined in.
"That's the brain trust at work all right," said Jennifer. They want us to say "I can certainly help you with that today" at the start of every support call. This is such classical marketing bullshit that we should frame the slide and hang it up somewhere.
"Where do we even start with what's wrong with this? All they've shown is that people who don't get a resolution to their problem are dissatisfied. The dogs in the street could have told them that.
"And in fairness, there is an issue. We need to help customers resolve their problems. Which by and large we do. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, Gregory. I'm sure you do, but we're in the high 90 percent somewhere with problem resolution."
Gregory nodded.
Jennifer went on. "Always room to improve, but the really hard-to-fix issues need all sorts of in-depth work to address - network coverage, firmware updates, billing system discrepancies, whatever.
"But Marketing don't care about that, the poor clueless babies. They're going to make everything better magically just by having us tell people that we can fix their problem, whether or not we actually can.
"I'm not going to say that to my callers. They'll know that I'm following a stupid marketing script and I'll lose the ability to earn their trust. You can replace me with an AI if you want. At least it won't have any qualms about spouting bullshit."
She dropped her folder on the table and sat back.
Gregory looked around at the group.
"Do you all agree with Jennifer's jaundiced view?" he asked.
Heads nodded enthusiastically.
"Then what do you suggest we do?"
"Ignore it," said Jennifer. "If anyone asks, say you never got it. Ask them to re-send it. Ask how many people is 3.7%. Ask for a bar chart instead of the pie chart. Tell them we've got a colour-blind team member and they need to use different colours in their charts. With Marketing's rate of turnover there will be nobody left who worked on this research travesty within a couple of months. Or if there is they'll be engrossed with some shiny new toy."
Eleni spoke up. "In the meantime, I've brought some baklava."
Gregory turned off the screen and reached for a piece.
It was delicious.
A satisfied silence filled the meeting room.
Copyright © Gerry Gaffney 2024