Neverending calls to automated customer service lines aren\u2019t just frustrating \u2013 new research suggests they may be quietly radicalising as well<\/p>\n
Question: what are the eight most annoying words in the English language? Answer: \u201cYour call is important to us \u2026 please hold.\u201d But when you have turned into a gibbering wreck after 10 minutes of your valuable time have ticked away \u2013 intermittently punctuated by assurances that, while your tormentor is \u201cexperiencing high call volumes at the moment\u201d, nevertheless your call is still important to him\/her\/it \u2013 you can take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. In fact, you belong to the majority of sentient beings in an industrial society like ours.<\/p>\n
Thanks to a useful piece of market research, we now have an idea of the numbers of victims of this industrial practice \u2013 at least in the UK. A survey commissioned by the New Britain Project<\/a> thinktank found that the average Briton spends between 28 and 41 minutes every week coping with inefficient customer service systems, and that nearly four-fifths of them are frustrated by \u201cthe wasted time, the unnecessary friction, and the quiet resignation that has become part of daily interactions with both public and private services\u201d.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Neverending calls to automated customer service lines aren\u2019t just frustrating \u2013 new research suggests they may be quietly radicalising as well Question: what are the eight most annoying words in the English language? Answer: \u201cYour call is important to us \u2026 please hold.\u201d But when you have turned into a gibbering wreck after 10 minutes … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}