By Martyn Walker
Published in Letters from a Nation in Decline
The modern call centre was not designed to solve your problem. It was designed to make your problem someone else’s responsibility.
There was a time—not so long ago—when you could pick up the telephone and speak to someone in authority. Not a chatbot, not an overseas “operative,” not an algorithm tasked with guessing which service category most closely matched the thing that was bothering him. A human being. On the premises. With some measure of agency. One might even call it customer service—a phrase now drained of meaning, like so much corporate jargon turned to husk.
It’s easy to sentimentalise the past, but this isn’t nostalgia. It’s an observation. In 1980, if I had a query about a spare part, a refund, or a change to an order, I called the shop. The shop answered. A man in a brown coat wiped his hands and told me the truth. Perhaps he had to check in the storeroom. Perhaps he said no. But he said something. And I was no longer in doubt.
Now, try calling your local Halfords. Or Sainsbury’s. Or Currys. You’ll search for a phone number, find what looks like a local line, dial it with hope—and find yourself deep in the circuitry of a call centre. Often abroad. The voice will be polite, inoffensive, robotic. And its sole mission is to extract your details. Your name, postcode, date of birth, your grievance if you’re lucky. But it cannot solve your problem. It may not even understand it. You are not speaking to someone in the branch. You are speaking to data acquisition software in human form.
This isn’t a bug. It is the design. You, dear customer, are not a person but a unit of behavioural metadata. A record to be “triaged,” escalated, or dropped. The goal is not to help you but to contain you. Hold times, circular menus, dead-end email addresses, disappearing contact forms—these are not symptoms of strained service, but strategies of avoidance. No longer is the customer always right. The customer is barely relevant.
And when you finally breach the firewall—after ten minutes of hold music and a few weak apologies—you’re passed back, with luck, to the store you originally tried to reach. Or worse, told they “can’t connect you but will raise a ticket.” The circle begins again.
This model of service has metastasised. The state has adopted it with vigour. HMRC—an organisation I once respected—now behaves like a digital fortress. I have owed them money and seen the efficiency with which they communicate. But now they owe me a refund—one triggered at the height of the pandemic, over four years ago—and they are unreachable. My letters go unanswered. Emails are met with silence. Phone calls are looped through menus that lead nowhere. I cannot speak to anyone. And yet, if I were late in payment, I have no doubt I would be found [1].
We are told that these systems are more efficient. That technology has made things easier. That chatbots, web portals, apps, and ticketing systems have replaced “old-fashioned” service with something faster and more scalable. But these are lies. The system is not more efficient—it is more opaque. More exhausting. The problem is no longer one of supply, or of timing, but of deliberate misdirection.
You are meant to give up. That is the efficiency: your defeat.
The corporations know you have nowhere else to go. Tesco boasts of “price matching” against Aldi or Lidl, but only for items carefully selected as competitive loss leaders [2]. The supermarkets function as a cartel in all but name. There is no real price war—only a performance of it. And when every supplier adopts the same approach to service—offshored, automated, evasive—what alternative is left? Who do you reward with your custom?
The human voice—the oldest tool in commerce—is now treated as a cost centre. Empathy is expensive. Initiative is a risk. It is far safer, from a boardroom perspective, to channel all contact into a data funnel, log the frustration, and offer a £5 voucher once a month to appear caring.
Meanwhile, the consumer—the citizen, the taxpayer—is left howling into the void. Asking not even for special treatment, but for the basic reciprocity that once governed civil society.
And so I write this not as a technophobe—far from it—but as someone who sees the difference between progress and abandonment. We have not been “streamlined” into a new age of customer empowerment. We have been reduced. Stripped of our right to a voice, replaced with a row of dropdown menus and a number on a dashboard.
What has died is not merely service. It is the principle of response.
And without response, there can be no trust.
References
- National Audit Office (2022). Customer Service Performance at HMRC. NAO report showing average call waiting times exceeding 20 minutes, with some refund cases unresolved after more than a year.
- Competition & Markets Authority (CMA), 2023. Supermarket Price Competition Review. The report notes that “price match” campaigns often use cherry-picked items, typically loss leaders, creating an illusion of parity while overall basket prices diverge.
- Citizens Advice Bureau (2021). The Customer Service Crisis. Documenting the shift to automated and offshore customer service in key industries and its impact on vulnerable groups.
- Financial Times (2023). Retailers’ use of behavioural data surpasses customer service investment. A feature highlighting that major UK retailers spend significantly more on data analytics than on staff training or customer resolution.
- House of Commons Treasury Committee (2024). Digital Services and the Decline of Public Accountability. Evidence submitted to Parliament showing the impact of digital interfaces on HMRC accountability and customer complaints handling.
Metadata
Title: Press One for Betrayal
Series Title: Letters from a Nation in Decline
Series Volume: Letter XI
Author: Martyn Walker
Language: English (UK)
Date of Publication: 2025-04-16
Edition: First
Abstract / Short Description:
An essay on the erosion of human-centred customer service in modern Britain, revealing how citizens are now treated as data points, not people. Through sharp satire and lived experience, Press One for Betrayal confronts the state and corporate sectors’ weaponisation of digital systems to deflect responsibility and suppress contact. The personal becomes political in this eleventh letter from a nation in visible decline.
BISAC Subject Headings (Book Industry Standards and Communications):
- SOC026000 – Social Science / Sociology / General
- BUS070060 – Business & Economics / Customer Relations
- POL023000 – Political Science / Public Policy / Economic Policy
- TEC003070 – Technology / Social Aspects
- COM087000 – Computers / Human-Computer Interaction
LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings):
- Customer services—Great Britain
- Call centers—Great Britain
- Public administration—Effect of technological innovations on—Great Britain
- Data protection—Great Britain
- Communication—Technological innovations—Social aspects—Great Britain
- Administrative agencies—Great Britain—Public opinion
- Surveillance capitalism—Great Britain
- Government accountability—Great Britain
Keywords / Tags for Indexing:
customer service, HMRC, UK bureaucracy, call centres, digital inefficiency, datafication, corporate indifference, public sector decay, satire, Letters from a Nation in Decline
Verbal Alchemy 