"We have armies of people whose only job is to handle exceptions..."

Collaboration Consultant [Mike Jones, London] writes:

"I remember a colleague in and consultancy group that I used to work for telling me some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!"

Ouch!

Of course this explains why the service desk is no good at providing useful data about the exceptions they encounter - if we were able to identify and fix the exceptions, they would not have anything to do, so we'd pay them less $$$. Yet another reason why outsourcing your support organization can be a non-optimized solution.