Many people in business have no option but to keep their phones on voicemail and never take an unsolicited enquiry.  Or have they?

To call a company in the UK is often to be met by an automated switch with a circumlocution algorithm that Dickens would have marvelled at.  If we are lucky, we engage with voice recognition software which at least causes merriment in the office even if it doesn’t get us any further with our goal.   If we do get a human being on the end of the phone, such reception staff are often guarded and suspicious.  Their job seeming to be to make sure that telephone calls into the organisation never reach their destination; when logic suggests the reverse must have been the original intention. Maybe they are targeted on this by their management and rewarded on the basis of the number of thwarted calls they can generate?  There is only one situation that is worse and that is the company that is fronted entirely by a customer services call centre.  These operators are to be sympathised with rather than castigated, because they have been set up by cynical senior personnel who have put them in the firing line but not given them access to the correct information needed to satisfy any non-customer related issue.

The cost of this in wasted time must be ferocious.  The extra time needed by suppliers to reach their future customers creates a higher than necessary cost of sale which is ultimately born by the very same perpetrators of the diversionary tactics when they final buy!

The curious thing is that after obtaining contact names and numbers through a complex process of desk and phone research, these same contacts, jealously guarded by their switchboards, are often revealed to be welcoming and ready to engage with messages that are relevant to them. I have experienced this so many times that I wonder whether they know the extent to which they are being deliberately isolated from the rest of the business world. They must wonder why so few people call them.

The other curious thing about this behaviour is that it is, one the whole, largely British.  Calling into similar companies abroad does not lead to the same avenue of abuse.  Senior contacts in Europe are often readily available on their mobile phones (numbers obtained from the switchboard), a short conversation deciding whether or not the opportunity on offer is of relevance.  Of course no-names policies do exist outside the UK but they are generally conveyed in polite terms by able, multilingual receptionists.

I conclude that the power to deflect a business-to-business telephone call whether by software or by so called gate-keepers has become a compensatory behaviour that suits the British psyche.  What ever else goes wrong in their lives they can at least make sure the George Dickinson in Operational Risk has not received an unsolicited inbound call since the clocks went forward.  But is it good business?