IT IS A popular refrain, with virtually every person that has ever had the misfortune to interact with a complex bureaucratic system, that it can be, to put it mildly, frustrating. Tales abound of the miles of red tape, the hours spent on hold, the infinitely regressive referrals to other departments. The clichés used to describe bad bureaucracy are almost as common as the experiences they describe. This seems to me a poor state of affairs, on many levels. In reality, the complex modern bureaucracies that underpin today’s world are really great achievements, coordinating hundreds of thousands of people, near-infinite quantities of information and diverse, competing goals in order to produce modern civilisation. Given the importance of this innovation to human history, it therefore seems desperately sad that it is so widely detested. Doubly so, it seems a great shame that this state of affairs should be so widely accepted. People seem to accept that poor customer service is an inherent, unavoidable fact of large organisations – particularly in the public sector.
The current system – and here I’m thinking particularly of the public bureaucracy in the government, but the same principle applies broadly to other organisaitons – relegates the consumer experience a long way away from the top priorities of the people designing managerial systems. Often, departments are left to sort out their own contact or customer service functions, with neither standard practice nor any kind of interconnected system available to guide them. This leaves the consumer in the unenviable position of having to interconnect many fantastically disparate sources of information across the entire field of the problem they’re trying to solve, interacting with many different organisations that barely communicate with each other, and are wholly uncoordinated. Functionally, this is a massive productivity loss. We are forcing everyone in our society to dedicate masses of time to working out how to talk to the civil service that we created in order to support their lives – it’s frankly ridiculous that it’s so hard.
I hope to propose one way to solve this problem, while generating substantial graduate employment and improving our society’s productivity. A new government service should be set up, employing young, tech-savvy people to form a kind of massive, distributed call centre. They would be given training, and tasked with connecting citizens to the government service that they’re seeking. Someone hoping to get a refund on an incorrectly labelled business expense on their tax return, for example, should be able to call up one of these workers, describe the problem, then take that worker’s specific extension and talk to the same person until the issue is resolved. That worker would then have the task of actually finding the information, finding the relevant services, and finding the solution to the consumer’s problem. In short, the consumer would gain an agent who would become their point of access to the government bureaucracy – this is the Point-Agent service model I propose.
Further, it seems to me that this kind of work would be uniquely suited to young graduates or even – in a more junior role – sixth-formers. Being tech-savvy, young, and flexible, these workers would easily be able to learn the new skills, information and thought processes necessary for this kind of labour. It could serve as a generally available back-up role for students, who could work just a few hours per day remotely, while performing a genuinely useful social function. Some of these young people would, over time, take their new knowledge with them into the civil service or into broader society, promoting both a general familiarity with government systems and a deep disposition to value interconnectedness and efficiency.
As a side note, this scheme could be but one of a portfolio of roles available to a national job guarantee scheme – but that is an issue outside the scope of this short essay.
This is all to say that the current interface that our society uses to talk to its own supporting bureaucracy is obviously broken, and criminally inefficient. There is no reason that this should be allowed to go on. The way to solve it, then, is that oldest tool in the box of those who pursue efficiency – specialisation of labour. We could employ or overeducated young to help the rest of society become more efficient, at the same time giving them both valuable experience and valuable income. In short, we can fundamentally change how people experience bureaucratic systems – from grudging, belligerent toleration to the pleasant satisfaction of efficiency.
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