“We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.”
Cory Doctorow on the decline of tech services in the FT earlier this year
I return to comments like this while processing a constant frustration nagging at me since setting up Distinctive in 2022.
Not the biggest challenge, for sure. Working through disruption caused by the mini budget was more severe. Moving office at short notice just before last Christmas more stressful.
But it’s ever-present, and hiding in plain sight. A barrier to progress, sapping energy, and draining my sense of humour. All made worse by the feeling that it shouldn’t happen at all. But it does anyway.
I’m referring to days of precious time wasted trying and failing to contact big organisations – banks, public bodies, utility companies and tech providers.
All say they are there to help. Some sell their services on a promise of simplifying customers’ lives, while making any contact with them complicated, arduous and slow.
They lie. These empty pledges mask a painful reality of badly designed tech that blocks meaningful human contact. This is laid bare in the recent UK Customer Satisfaction Index by the Institute of Customer Service, which found satisfaction levels at their lowest level since 2010.
It’s what writer Cory Doctorow’s ‘great enshittening’ describes; a process of decline in services we rely on, as companies chase efficiency and leave customers wrestling with clunkiness at their own cost.
Convenient for who?
I see this in ‘convenient’ systems that expect users to download an app to park in places without reliable mobile connections. This story about a woman who was fined nearly £2,000 for taking more than five minutes to park her car on an app in a blackspot is depressing on one level. The company’s comment that she’s the ‘author of her own misfortune’ is outrageous. It’s also a logical outcome when businesses lose touch with what their customers really need, like an easy way to park that doesn’t involve endless faffing about.
It’s there when banks earnestly tell you that the best way to prepare for a tough 2025 is to get online, while closing high street branches in towns and villages across the country.
And it’s a voice on call handlers’ shoulders, pressing them to say they can’t help, adding that you should speak to the council, credit card provider, or anyone else other than them.
The ‘convenience’ on offer here gives scant regard to customers’ time spent trying to navigate the hellscape created by badly designed processes. It leaves big companies untouchable and their bosses unaccountable, while customer service departments pour over data and consider new ways to make their processes more efficient. Efficient for their teams, at least.
It takes a bloody persistent punter to get through this system. Over the last year or so, I secured a few hundred quid in compensation for terrible service. That it shouldn’t be like this shouldn’t even need saying, even though I’ve said it twice in this post.
But here we are, all the same.
Bad service: making tax difficult
I offer special mention here to HMRC. Bearing a mission to simplify everyone’s tax affairs, this public body is a vital link between the state, around 34m taxpayers, and 5m businesses.
In considering ways to serve the public more efficiently, they created a disaster zone for those stuck in the system – on hold, online, in person.
The National Audit Office issued a blistering report this year on the scale of HMRC’s failings. It said the public spent a total of 800 years on hold trying to get through to HMRC to resolve queries that bots, Q&As and online ‘how to…’ guides simply don’t solve.
After struggling at the hands of these chronically dysfunctional systems for more than a year, I’m not surprised at this.
I spent days trying to resolve issues that they created and appear unable to resolve. Phones go dead after waiting on hold. Emails go unanswered. I’ve never had access to an online portal they insist on sending messages to. Social media? Just fill out a form and they’ll ignore it. After months of this, escalating the issue to CEO Jim Harra got a swift response from the complaints team, and an eventual apology. As I write, the issue remains unresolved.
As the NAO report highlights, the notion that this way of working is more efficient for anyone involved is ludicrous. Yes, it reduces call volumes because people give up and can’t get through. But those who stick with it take much more time to process satisfactorily, increasing cost and staff resources needed to deal with it.
Want to break things? There’s an app for that
Although he writes about the tech industry, Doctorow’s enshittification thesis brings together a set of corporate trends that connects these behaviours across big organisations. In striving for efficiency and extracting value from interactions with the public, he argues that some organisations no longer measure what’s important.
Some are so big that they are no longer concerned about customer pushback or flight to competitors.
And we now move uncritically and without adequate preparation to using AI to make this even more ‘efficient’ and ‘convenient’. What this means for those at the sharp end stuck on hold is anyone’s guess. Noone has the courtesy to ask us whether we want this, of course. At least not before telling us to download an app first.
As businesses face big tax changes following the recent budget, HMRC needs to raise its game. If we treated our clients like this at Distinctive, they’d quite rightly go elsewhere and we’d go out of business.
Please understand that I’m not offering a luddite ‘anti AI’ viewpoint here. I think tech is good. We use it every day to augment – not do – our work. I’ve written about it in industry publications.
But concerns about tech’s advance is often misrepresented and over-simplified, in my view. It’s not just people who don’t have access to the internet who feel unsettled by the changes I’m writing about. People who use tech every day are fed up with ‘solutions’ that don’t work and make simple tasks more difficult for them.
We certainly didn’t ask to spend days on hold. Every hour we spend being ignored, is an hour we could spend on our own businesses. But we don’t have to accept it either. And this is why there’s reason to hope: beyond the great enshittening, there are many who put people at the heart of their businesses.
They answer their phones. They do what they say they’ll do, on time. This should be basic, entry level stuff. Set against what I see elsewhere, it’s increasingly a stand-out feature.
Putting people at the heart of our work
We committed a couple of years ago to always to be where our clients want us, when they need us. I believe this, along with brilliant, committed staff is why more than half our clients gave us a score of at least nine out of 10 when rating our services.
It’s also seen us shortlisted for two awards this year as turnover and team headcount steadily grew in 2024.
I’m very proud of that, and more convinced than ever that there’s still a place for organisations who put great people at the heart of their work and use tech to enable that success.
As we move into next year, we’ll look for partners and suppliers who share this commitment. An understanding of how they will address any issues will be essential.
For any leaders of bigger organisations reading this, I’d suggest stepping into customers’ shoes. Try contacting your customer service team at lunch time to see how it really works. If you can get through within an hour, congratulations. If you’re still on hold at 2.30pm, you have a glimpse into millions of people’s everyday frustrations.
I hope also ministers looking at boosting productivity and support business growth set firm expectations for customer service to drive up standards and reduce waste by making organisations own their responsibilities.
And if, just maybe if, you’re HMRC: I’m still waiting to see the information on this portal you tell me exists. You have my number and can call me any time.