Читать книгу Good Services - Lou Downe - Страница 16

When Jordan Haignes started to get phone calls from Citigroup about repaying a loan, he didn’t know why. He was annoyed. The bank, it seemed, thought he owed them $15,000. But Jordan hadn’t ever taken out a loan with Citigroup. After some investigation, it transpired that, like millions around the globe before him, he had been the victim of identity fraud. Someone had taken his name, address, date of birth and other information and run up a bill of thousands on a credit card in his name. He complained, why had Citigroup agreed to give this fake Jordan a credit card, and why, now that the fraud was discovered, was it his job to sort it out?

The answer lies in our fundamentally different views on what we expect from services, in contrast with our expectations of almost anything else in our lives.

Any person in the US who is a victim of identity fraud is legally required to prove that their identity has been stolen in order to not be held liable for any damage done by that impersonator – and yet service providers don’t suffer these penalties when they fail to identify users correctly.

This is a problem that stretches across the banking services sector and beyond, and it shows that, not only are the providers of services often not culpable for the failure of their service, they’re often unwittingly involved in engineering its failure themselves – whether they know it or not.

Katy Highland was one such victim of accidental service sabotage. A teacher from New Rochelle, New York, Katy took out a loan when she went to college to pay for her teaching degree. When she graduated, she soon found herself struggling to repay her loan with two small children on a teacher’s tiny salary.

She called her loan company, Navient – one of the many organisations the US government outsources loan management to – and was offered to pause the payments on her loan.

Thinking this was her only option, she paused her payments.

What Katy didn’t realise was that there was a government scheme that meant that – as a teacher – she was eligible to write off the remainder of her loan if she paid 120 consecutive payments on time. Every time she deferred her payments to Navient, she was racking up interest and disqualifying herself from the scheme. So why, when this clearly wasn’t the best thing for her to do, was she repeatedly told to defer her payments every time she called Navient?

As it turns out, Navient, like many organisations, has a strict limit on the amount of time a call centre operator can spend on the phone with a customer without losing their bonus. In this case, it’s 7 minutes.

What with the numerous identity checks, surveys and statutory notices that need to be made to meet company policy, that 7 minutes becomes more like 5 – not much time to give high-quality advice to someone like Katy. In fact, almost the only thing you can do in 5 minutes on the phone to Navient – apart from complain – is to defer your loan. So this is what happened to Katy.

From top to bottom, everyone involved in providing this service to Katy, and the millions like her, is incentivised to provide a service that harms both individual users and society as a whole. Navient was being incentivised by the US government to provide a cheap service, not an effective one, just as each call centre operator was incentivised to get Katy off the phone as quickly as possible. No one was focused on making sure that Katy could afford to keep teaching.

Individually, these can all seem like accidents, ‘just the way the service works’. But at some point, they were all conscious decisions that add up to a service that neither meets the needs of individual users nor the goals of the organisation providing it. Someone decided to implement a 7-minute rule on the call centre and keep it there, despite the length of time each person needs to spend on customer identity checks. Someone decided not to train all staff in the government scheme that would have meant that Katy could have written off her loan.

As of 2018, 44 million Americans owed a total of $1.5 trillion in student loans. About 4 million of those Americans are already in default and a large number are on their way. At the same time, the US is facing an unprecedented shortage of teachers – caused, in part because of the low wages and high expectations of formal education.

These things happen because we don’t design services, we let them happen by accident. The services we use everyday, from student loans to healthcare and housing, are more likely to be the product of technological constraints, political whim and personal taste than they are the conscious decision of an individual or organisation. By not designing our services, we’re accepting that they will simply evolve to the conditions around them, regardless of whether or not that means a service meets user needs, is financially sustainable or achieves a certain outcome.