Plus, as Kate at Small Dead Animals often points out “Mischief is important“:
In one of the only three management books anyone should bother to read — and everyone should read the three — Robert Townsend says that a CEO should, while on the road, try phoning his own company. Try the helpline and see how far he gets. Try calling his own office. Sure, you should end up with the Executive Secretary who then directs it to the right person but sometimes that correct person is going to be you. Say, Warren Buffett calling to make you rich by buying the company and thus crystallising all your stock options and RSUs.
This is a lesson that has been forgotten. From a Guardian list of things government should pass laws to make happen:
Force companies to put a phone number on their homepage
You’ve got a problem with a company and you want to get it sorted – and then you realise you cannot find a number for it anywhere. There are communications companies that have no “contact us” link anywhere to be seen, and energy companies that send you all round the houses looking for a way to get in touch.
One of the recurring themes of Guardian Money readers’ problems is the struggle to find someone to help when something goes wrong. Clearly, once you have published a phone number, you need staff at the other end answering the phone and offering some joined-up thinking, so this is only the start of the solution – but at least customers would not feel like companies were trying to hide from them.
This does not work as there is no guarantee that anyone will answer the call.
We’ve also that basic point that Burke and his Little Platoons can — and often do — solve problems better than government. So, here’s the pitch for that private sector service.
We set up a database of the home and work and mobile phone numbers — emails too — of the management of companies. Most importantly, the board of directors. If the company is owned by private equity — say — then the General Partners of the PE company.
Obviously, if a company has a helpline, which people answer, then all of that information stays private to us. If a company does not then we publish it as a page saying these are the contact numbers for that company. Say, Evri, the delivery people. The board members get their numbers and email publicly revealed. As I recall it they’re PE as well so some number of GPs over in the US also start getting aggrieved calls from Lesser Wallop about non-delivery. Not that any Septic would be able to understand Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop but it’s the instance of the call that matters. Evri is used as an example for a bit of looking around a few months back seemed to reveal that they had no UK phone number at all. Thus the directors it will be.
The top management of companies that do not provide a helpline — nor answer the one they claim to have — will have the customer complaints calls directed toward them. This will, of course, rapidly mean the opening of a useful customer complaint line that people actually answer. Those making that £250k a year as the board member of whatever do not want to be talking to Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop. Therefore phone calls from Ms. Aggrieved will lead to the creation of a useful customer services department.
At which point, of course, we take the board members’ phone numbers down and job done. But, clearly, we keep monitoring to ensure that those service times don’t then decline.
Make the bastards who make the decisions suffer the consequences of those decisions. Works this does, really, it works.
Now, there will be some who say that government can do that. Why use the Little Platoons when a law can simply be passed?
Which is to miss a basic philosophic point, which is that we should only use government when we, ourselves, cannot do it. Government is for when the Little Platoons cannot achieve it. Letters of Marque are lovely things but biffing the Frenchies is better done with a Royal Navy. Assuming we still had one of course. RNLI, on the other hand, works better without government than it would with.
But much more than that. For who are the worst at providing a contact number that works? Why, that would be government, wouldn’t it? Anyone ever tried to ‘phone HMRC? Quite.
