My mobile must be a call centre quandry. Whenever my perky, “Hello?” is met with, “Ahh good evening, could I speak to Miss Curr-loe Cornish please?” and I sense the office hubbub of row upon row of desperate phone-drones on spinny chairs, I don’t hang up. Actually, I get all excited. After batting back prying about my double-glazing needs for as long as I and they can bear, I have a tendency to try and turn the conversation around. “So let’s talk about you,” husks Dr Cornish into the receiver, part telephone shrink, part nosy hack. Generally this is met with a nervous “aaauhhm,” and lame excuses about the laser vision of supervisors who might strangle them with their headset. But just occasionally-rarely-sometimes, I learn something.Â
The other day a homelessness charity called me. Apparently when I was in London I’d written my name on someone’s clipboard. Perhaps I’m still a little naïve about clipboards. Anyway, I may be a bean saving thrift bag, but I’m still doing a darn sight better than someone who has to sleep in a trolley. So I was happy to listen to this telephone chappie’s practiced patter and say I’d give them some money because I’m nice. Once we’d got my £3 a month direct debit sorted out (philanthropy at it’s most generous), I decided I’d earned some quality get to know you time. And rather revelatory it was too.
So this voice, whom I shall name Bucko, because he sounded a teensy bit like Adam Buxton of Adam and Joe fame, was not a volunteer for the aforementioned charity. No sirree. He got paid in real life pounds because he worked for a company called Go Gen. Come again? It transpired that the homelessness charity, along with many of Britain’s other big helpful people organisations, contract out their telephone fundraising to a private agency. And this is no non-profit, woolly hat and sandals outfit. They’re being paid £97,000 for their trouble. Now that seems like a lot, doesn’t it? But maybe our gal Go Jen will be raking in a cool couple of million from the punters, to get a chilly somebody a mattress and a roof? Well, not really. They’re estimating a total of around 324 grand. That’s over 4 years. I may be no economist but I’m pretty sure that nearly a third of what they’re hoping to fundraise will have been used to pay the fundraising company themselves. In fact, practically all the profits they make the first year will feed Gennifer.
“Hold on there, Bucko”, said I, “but that’s rubbish, isn’t it?” It was a cold and unwarranted assault. Paxman points. The previously smooth talking Bucko began aurally sweating through his headset and muttering that garroting by a supervisor was imminent. Bucko was running dry on information, so I apologised for being aggressive and let him off the hook.
I felt a teensy bit annoyed to know that every month, maybe as many as one of my three stirlings will be channelled into a phone-bank, rather than getting somebody off the pavement for the night. Naturally I googled about in search of other vexed parties. But apart from 5 webpages of careful corporate wiffle from Gennifer, the only other hit of interest was a post on Yahoo! moaning about being rung up by Go Gen chuggers. No one seems to have noticed that a lot of charity money is being swallowed up in trying to rustle up more charity money. I’m probably being simple, but the maths doesn’t seem to add up. We need to interrogate more call centre clones, or how will we know whether or not Oxford’s homeless are getting value for our money?
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