Martin’s office was orderly and stark. The blandness of it surprised Rosie, even though she’d been in here several times before. There was precious little of anything personal to be seen, despite the fact he’d occupied the space for as long as they’d worked together. Even Rosie’s tiny desk, which she sat at only in shifts, had her favourite pens, a pretty coaster and a half-eaten packet of Hobnobs on it.
Martin’s clothes were similarly nondescript: grey slacks, black shoes and a white shirt that, unfortunately, was a little more transparent than Rosie would have liked. She cringed at the realisation that she could see his chest hair through it.
Martin also wore a charcoal-coloured tie – the sort a provincial bank manager might have sported in the 1980s, but which was completely unnecessary in the here and now. He was quite short – only a little taller than Rosie, who was five feet five – and for the last two years had sported what Niamh would have called ‘seriously ill-advised facial hair’. This took the form of a wispy goatee that did nothing to strengthen his weak chin.
‘Miss Butler,’ Martin said, breathing stale coffee fumes in Rosie’s direction. ‘Please sit.’ He gave the statement the same gravity that a High Court judge might employ when instructing a clerk to bring out the defendant.
She sank onto the stiff, unyielding couch on the other side of his desk, but said nothing. Martin’s affected formality grated on her, making her feel defensive even though, as far as she knew, she’d done nothing she needed to worry about.
If anything, Rosie felt quietly confident that she was good at customer service – charming, even, compared with some of her colleagues, and by no means a shirker. Nevertheless, she braced herself.
‘I’m speaking with all team members about the need to ensure time-wastage is minimised,’ Martin began, steepling his fingers and bringing them to rest on what Rosie couldn’t avoid thinking of as his surprisingly hirsute chest.
‘I’m sure you can appreciate that every minute lost to unproductive activity represents a cost to the company,’ Martin went on. ‘These are costs we can ill afford in this economy. This issue is of significant interest to senior management, and I’ve been tasked with creating a strategy that will tackle our budgetary “black hole”, shall we say.’
Rosie felt her eyes start to glaze over.
‘I see,’ she said, not seeing at all.
‘Very good,’ Martin answered. ‘Then you’ll also understand, Miss Butler, why I took the decision to review all claims handlers’ recent recorded calls. My aim was, of course, to assess them for efficiency.’
‘Right,’ Rosie nodded, wondering why Martin’s speech was modelled after a member ofDownton Abbey’s landed gentry. If Ellie’s intel was correct, he’d been born and brought up in Edmonton.
‘I have some concerns about several of your recent calls,’ Martin pressed on, frowning. ‘No doubt you’re aware of what I’m referring to.’
Rosie felt her breath catch in her throat. Was this about Mr Bathurst and his unsuccessful claim? Shehadsort of hung up on him, she supposed – though only after asking if she could help him any further and receiving an emphatic no in response.
‘I … er—’ Rosie mumbled. ‘Sorry. No.’
‘Indeed? Allow me to explain,’ Martin said, shaking his head at her in apparent disappointment. ‘First of all: last week you spoke with Mrs Edith Green – a customer based in Coleshill, Buckinghamshire. Your conversation lasted twenty-two minutes, eight of which consisted solely of the lady wittering on about her husband’s cataracts.’
‘What?’ Rosie asked, nonplussed. Even if Martin’s close analysis of the timings was correct, she didn’t see how they reflected onher.
‘Cataracts!’ Martin barked loudly, as if Rosie were hard of hearing rather than baffled by the turn this discussion had taken. ‘In what way does allowing the woman to drone on about her other half’s eyesight advance us towards our CHIM target? How does it contribute to the growth of our business? More to the point, how does it relate to her claim for a storm-damaged greenhouse?’
Rosie racked her brains, unable to remember what on earth the CHIM target was. Shehatedthese stupid acronyms … Then, in a flash, it came to her:Claims Handled In the Month. ‘Well … it doesn’t,’ she said, finally. ‘Not directly, anyway. But isn’t Cover 4 U known for its excellent customer service? The strapline on all our ads is “low prices, high standards and a human touch”.’
Rosie stifled an embarrassed shudder as she quoted this, wondering under what circumstances anyone would ever letMartinoffer them a ‘human touch’. ‘The poor woman had just been told that her husband needed surgery and was worried sick,’ she pressed on. ‘She was overwhelmed – dealing with a load of different problems at once. She needed to talk, and telling her to zip it didn’t seem like the best way to proceed.’
‘There’s good customer service,thenthere’s letting a customer talk at you relentlessly while you coo in sympathy,’ Martin said triumphantly. ‘There’s also the matter of your directing the customer to the NHS website for reassurance,’ he continued. ‘Hardly your job, Miss Butler.’
Rosie took a deep breath and tried to quell her rising annoyance. ‘I felt it was the best way to calm her down and get the conversation back on track,’ she said. ‘I was very aware of the lady’s old age. If I’d upset her, it would hardly have reflected well on the company, would it?’
‘This meeting is about inefficiency, not Cover 4 U’s brand health,’ Martin ranted. ‘That call, in my judgement, was highly inefficient.’
Rosie swallowed and said nothing, furious as well as mildly nauseated by the phrase ‘brand health’.
Martin took her silence as humble acceptance of his ‘judgement’ and continued: ‘Next – your conversation with a Miss Shivani Sharma regarding her car insurance claim.’
Rosie listened as he outlined all the ways in which he believed she’d mishandled the call. Again, she’d supposedly given the customer’s worries ‘too much airtime’. She’d also been ‘overly reassuring’ and ‘too quick to imply we’d pay out’ when she explained that millions of people had bumps and scrapes in their cars – that such incidents were the reason why insurance policies existed.
Rosie remembered this conversation: a panicked call from a twenty-year-old girl who’d grazed the side of her mother’s car against a wall in a badly designed multistorey car park. Shivani Sharma had cried as Rosie asked her to explain the incident, struggling to articulate what had happened through her sobs. Only someone with a heart of stone could have stopped themselves offering her a little comfort.
And so it went on. Martin listed four more conversations that he felt Rosie had allowed to ‘drift off topic’, or during which she’d ‘wasted time being unnecessarily pleasant’.
Unnecessarily pleasant?Her mind boggled.
While Martin was capable of separating the speed at which Cover 4 U handled claims from the impression its staff left on customers, Rosie knew this to be a wilfully stupid feat of doublethink. Yes, conversations would move more quickly if she, Ellie and the rest of the team were prepared to be rude, pushy and unsympathetic. However, it was absurd to pretend such briskness wouldn’t have consequences for the firm further down the line – especially with the older generation, who were high-value, brand-loyal customers, as Martin might have put it.
