Hole in my Bucket

There is an oft repeated pattern when you try to get information. You have a problem in using some organisation. So you go to their web site. You look for the answer. Not immediately there. Try their FAQs. Nothing relevant you can see from the titles. So you do a search. Either you get back hardly any replies or thousands, none of which are what you want. So you want to talk to somebody. You find, if you are lucky, a phone number. But when you dial it the waiting is interminable. And the final iritation is that you keep getting a voice saying you shouuld look at their website for answers to your questions!

There’s a hole in their bucket.

Why does this happen? Well it’s not possible to have FAQs that will cover eventuality. If you tried to produce very large numbers of FAQs that were very comprehensive you would produce a mass of information that was hard to search and still wouldn’t cover hard to predict issues. The other problem, waiting a long time on the phone, is simply it’s expensive to employ staff to talk to you. The ability of staff to solve your problem is often contributing to your wait. Many people ring back again and again because they are not satisfied with hasty answerss from ill-trained staff.