Closing underground ticket offices abandons 36 million passengers to screens and buttons. Farewell, customer service
Ian Dury did not, I think, foresee this turn of events. "I could be a writer with a growing reputation / I could be the ticket man at Fulham Broadway station," he sang in his 1978 hit What a Waste. The latter career path is being closed off. London Underground has announced that it will stop deploying human beings at tube station ticket offices, expecting passengers to use machines instead. Visitors to London, or any other passenger wanting assistance, will have to address themselves to the screens and buttons on the wall. Rage against the machine, as it were.
As is traditional in these situations, management has got a statistic ready to support its case. Fewer than 3% of tube journeys start with passengers visiting a ticket office, they say. But given that a total of 1.2 billion passengers travel on the tube every year, that 3% represents rather a lot of people. The mayor – who campaigned for election on a promise to keep ticket offices open – says there will be staff on hand to help. But, overall, 750 jobs are going, saving an estimated £270m over five years.
This is a familiar story. Brave and technically adept supermarket shoppers have for some time been able to use self-service checkouts, or "semi-attended, customer-activated terminals", as their fans like to call them. Perhaps I am unusually incompetent, but I have almost never had a trouble-free encounter with one of these machines, provoking the inevitable accusation of "unexpected item in the bagging area!". But think of the speed, the efficiency, the cost savings, you are told. To which you can only reply: expected bullshit in the management area.
Of course, the wage bill makes up the biggest cost most employers have to face. People can be quite expensive. And technology can make life better. With a PC on every desk, some secretarial jobs were bound to go. And when bank customers are carrying out so many of their basic transactions online, you might not need to keep so many branches open.
But something perverse is happening in our famous "service economy" when human beings are removed and the machines are wheeled in. "Customer service has become customer obfuscation," as the management writer Simon Caulkin put it recently. We see "the synthetic personalisation of e-commerce", while the face-to-face side of business is "systematically depersonalised". Delay, error and dissatisfaction are built in. Human beings become, apparently, a luxury we can no longer afford.
There is an economic as well as a human cost to this. The "hollowing out" of the labour market, with the disappearance of some medium-skill jobs, has been accompanied by growing wage inequality, as the Resolution Foundation (among others) has shown. There are potentially worrying implications for long-term demand in the economy if decent and moderately well-paid jobs are replaced by lower-skilled and less well-paid ones.
This too is nothing new. When a senior manager at Ford was showing off an automated production line to Walter Reuther, leader of the United Automobile Workers union, in the early 1950s, he asked: "Walter, how will you get these machines to pay their union dues?" To which Reuther replied: "How will you get them to buy your cars?"
Good businesses are supposed to be "customer focused". But in the name of efficiency something close to contempt is really what is being offered. As we lose human beings from the workplace, the humanity of those businesses and organisations is necessarily undermined. As top pay rises ever higher, wages for everybody else remain low and the economy struggles. It feels as though most of us have become – whether as employees or customers – part of a powerless majority. But do not worry. I've asked the helpdesk about this, and they say that my call is important to them.
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