Jester and Meetings (The Practical Alternative to Work)

On Tuesday my fellow jesters and I all received an e-mail announcing a Team Meeting, which was to take place the next day. We were to be split into two groups and one half of us would go to a meeting at 10am and the other at 11am. Of course, our Task Masters, I mean Managers, would get to go to both meetings. That was all: there was no agenda, just a meeting. One of my colleagues, a very dear friend but a very grumpy jester, Mr Grumpy, replied to the e-mail asking if there was an agenda but our Managers like to keep us in suspense so it would be a nice surprise for us and did not reply.

I was in the 11am meeting with Mr Grumpy so I knew it would be an enjoyable experience. I like meetings anyway. There is an e-mail that makes the rounds every now and again that sums meetings up very nicely for me.

When I'm in a meeting, I don't have to speak to angry customers, I don't have to compile boring complaint summaries and I don't have to check my epistoliphobic colleagues' letters. They really are the practical alternative to work.

The first group over-ran by about 10 minutes and when they emerged I went into the meeting with the second group armed with a pencil and note pad. I had already drawn a noughts and crosses grid on the page as a post-modern ironic gesture. Unfortunately, it went completely un-noticed. I sat next to Mr Grumpy and prepared to be alternatively annoyed and bored for the next hour.

There were four items on the agenda (so there was an agenda then, after all): Sensitive Clients, our current high volumes of complaints, Letters and that old Chestnut, PDRs.

The first, sensitive clients (or as I prefer to call them, demanding clients), is a source of much amusement to me. We sell products on behalf of various water companies, electricity and gas suppliers and other insurers. We are a specialist in home emergency insurance. I have sometimes wondered if there is a direct correlation between how demanding our clients are (water companies, electricity and gas suppliers and other insurers) and how poor their service to their customers is. I've only wondered but I suspect there is.

Our most demanding client supplies me with my gas and electricity, at least I pay my bills to them. They expect us to investigate, deal with and close complaints within 10 working days. That is risible when frequently we have to wait for the customers to send in invoices, reports, photographs or if the claim is still ongoing or if the customer is unavailable; sometimes the list of reasons can seem endless. Many of our complaints reach the trigger point of 40 days (when the customer can then refer his/her complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service) through no fault of our own. Not all complaints can be resolved with an apology and small goodwill gesture, especially now our society is getting as compensation-obsessed and litigious as our American Cousins.

Next on the agenda were the extraordinarily high volumes of complaints we are receiving. There are a number of very good reasons for this. The main one being that our colleagues in our Admin Department/Head Office want to sell more policies to make the company look better in the back end of the financial year and make the share prices increase. They have decided to sell these policies by making more Quality Control calls to our customers who have recently made claims. They can then sell policies to customers who have received good service. The other side of the coin, of course, is that more complaints are generated and we have to work harder. We have also introduced FSA training designed to make our call-centre staff better aware of what exactly is a complaint. They're now logging more and we are having to work harder. Actually, I have no objection to extra complaints being generated this way. It shows that our call centre colleagues are doing their jobs better. I just wish that our company would recruit more Goodwill Jesters to enable us to cope better.

Then there were the letters. I mentioned in a previous blog that most of my colleagues are epistoliphobic (a word I made up with the help of an online English/Greek dictionary). I was not wrong. There have been major ructions about the number of letters we now have to send, mostly from Mr Grumpy but many other jesters are also very unhappy with this. The major effect this has had on our department is that we are working more slowly and closing fewer complaints.

The extra letters were introduced on the back of an audit of our Sales Department carried out by Price Waterhouse Coopers at our Head Office, which was to ensure that we were FSA compliant before an FSA audit is carried out in July. I believe that the conclusions were less than complimentary. I also believe that our company, and the new practices came from the top directors, over-reacted to the audit, so we are now having to be super-compliant.

I actually am quite prepared to be super-compliant. I have already realised through my dealings as a complainer that the company I work for, or at least its complaints department, is very customer-friendly. I wish it were a little more employee friendly, that's all. I would prefer it, though, if our department could be enlarged to take account of the extra work we now have to do. Oh and our targets should be reduced to reflect it as well. Some help from the IT department in automatically filling in customer names and addresses in the letters would also be of assistance. One little help is to become available: our company is going to offer touch-typing courses to all jesters if they want to learn. This jester is proud to announce that she can already touch-type!

The irony of it is, the vast majority of our complaints are not FSA reportable, so, in theory at least, we do not have to be compliant. However, our head office expects us to mirror them and so we have to achieve the same high levels of FSA Compliance that they do.

The final agenda item was our PDRs (Performance and Development Reviews or "Do I get a pay rise and bonus or not?"). This has been a major concern to all the jesters over the years because we never get out PDRs on time. I suppose this is because winter is our busiest time of year and our Managers' workload tends to reflect ours. We have not had our monthly appraisals for many months (I have not had one since my half-year review) and so we have not been given any indication of how well or badly we have been performing. This year appears to be no exception. Apparently, they have drafted our PDRs but they are going to e-mail them to us in advance so that we can pre-approve them. It seems a bit strange to me but if it means I get a fair PDR on time, I'll go for it.

It seems that some things at the Dark Satanic Mill never change.