My phone broke this week, stopped working for calls and texts etc and the battery just started to vanish after about 5 minutes.
I’ve been trying to make it last 5 years, which would have been December, but I finally had to give up the ghost.
The problem when the text system doesn’t work on your phone is you can’t change your phone on the systems that the phone companies want you to change your phone on.
If you want to order a new sim card to check whether it’s just the sim card that’s broken (it’s not because the sim card isn’t linked to the battery), they have to text you a validation code in order to send you the sim card to check where you are.
They can’t text you a validation code if your texts don’t work.
Similarly, if you want to buy a new phone and do it in a way that is as seamless as possible, you need to get a pac code to change your number which is texted to you through the pac code texting system but doesn’t work very well if your texts don’t work.
So, you can go online and speak to the 'bot’ but they don’t want to give you a pac code because it means you’re leaving the company and they’d rather not give you a pac code as easily as possible in the hope that you’ll just not be bothered and then keep the phone that you’ve got and not change.
And so, when you then phone up you find out that the lines are overrun and they want you to talk into an automated system which asks you the answer to your security questions (from 4 1/2 years ago) without asking you the question.
I’ve got no f*cking idea what the question was 4 1/2 years ago and less idea of what the answer is.
And so, the barriers to getting a new phone to someone whose phone is broken and text is broken increased dramatically.
Add to that the fact that I was with O2 and my automatic upgrade deals with O2 are ludicrously more expensive than I can get if I switch to another company (if I could get a f*ucking pac code) and you realise that the companies are not at all keen to provide human based customer service in any way once they have you in.
They pay lip service at O2 to giving you deals for this or benefits for that but they won’t invest a single penny in somebody who can speak to you on the phone and help you with your problem.
And so, in always in these situations I reflected that back through my own business and my own work but realised that having a dental practice is very, very different to having a mobile phone company.
In general mobile phones work about 99% of the time but in dentistry patients encounter difficulties and concerns and problems ‘a lot’ of the time.
If I had a problem during or after encountering healthcare (and I mean a simple problem like swelling or irritation or a concern) frequently asked questions would not cut it.
We’ve made a long-term strategic decision in our practice that the technology should free-up the humans to be more human and so, where someone wants to access automated care (changing appointments, paying bills, signing consent) that can be done automatically, not so that I can reduce the amount of staff that I have but so that I can give the staff that I have the time to be human beings to other human beings.
In a world where human contact is being driven down and down and down, I have to believe that scarcity of human contact will make it become much more valuable.
Blog Post Number - 2840
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