IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Smartness 207
sulted. The twenty-minute transaction, as a result, was not unpleasant, and
I made the trip without trouble. Imagine my horror, then, when the train
company, NS International, announced its intention to close all its international
ticket desks. Anyone traveling to Belgium, Germany, France, or Switzerland
would have to buy their ticket from ‘‘self-service’’ websites or—and
here it boggles the mind—via text messages on their mobile phones.
The director of NS International at the time (February 2004), Frits Marckmann,
told me that ‘‘we are adopting modern methods of distribution.’’
Now, technically speaking, it may well be more ‘‘modern’’ to sell tickets
by SMS than via a human being. But as an example of service design—not
to mention plain common sense—the NS action would be laughable if
it were not also irresponsible. If it takes an expert human being, with years
of experience, twenty minutes to sell me one ticket to Switzerland, how
many hours would the same transaction take me using SMS? Ten? If I am
elderly, if I do not speak English or Dutch, if I do not have Internet access,
or if I simply refuse to spend hours of my life in clunky NS websites—in
these cases, I will be denied access to the service altogether. By the time
we reach that point, it will be too late to turn back. Up to three hundred
jobs are being designed out of the NS system. Assuming an average of ten
years’ experience per person, that’s three thousand years of human experience
that will be have been removed from the system. How smart is that?
The defining feature of services in this self-service economy is that they
take place with little or no human contact. The customer does work once
carried out by an employee but is not paid for so doing. On the contrary:
Netonomy, a firm that provides self-service software to telecom operators,
reckons online self-service can cut the costs of a transaction to as little as
ten cents, compared with around seven dollars to handle the same transaction
at a call center. A self-service kiosk in a supermarket can handle the
work of two and a half employees at a fraction of the cost. In 2001,
Amtrak introduced an interactive voice recognition (IVR) system called
Julie. The service handles a third of the rail system’s bookings, and The
Economist reported at the time that 80 percent of callers surveyed were
happy with the service. 66 That doesn’t sound so bad until you remember
that Amtrak carries an average of 22 million passengers a year—which
means that nearly 4.5 million passengers had a bad experience buying their
ticket online. When Forrester Research surveyed 110 large companies, it
found that only 18 percent of customer needs were met by IVR systems. 67