Team Work. By team work is meant the ability of a group of operators, seated side by side, to work together as a unit in caring for the service brought to them by the answering jacks within their reach. In switchboards of the construction usual today, a call before any operator may be answered by her, or by the operator at either the right or the left of her position. In many exchanges this advantage is wholly overlooked. In the period of general re-design of central-office equipments about fourteen years ago, a switchboard was installed with mechanical visual signals and answering-jacks on a flat-top board, and an arrangement of operators such that the signal of any call was extremely prominent and in easy reach of each one of four or possibly five operators. Associated with the line signals within the reach of such a group was an auxiliary lamp signal which would light when a call was made by any of the lines so terminating. It was found that with this arrangement the calls were answered in a strictly even manner, special rushes being cared for by the joint efforts of the group rather than serving to swamp the operator who happened to be in charge of the particular section affected by the rush.
This principle has been tried out in so many ways that it is astonishing that it is not recognized as being a vital one. The whole matter is accomplished by impressing upon each operator that her duty is, not to answer the calls of a specific number of lines before her, but to answer, with such promptness as is possible, any call which is within the reach of her answering equipment.
Observation of Service. All that is required to be known concerning the form of address and courtesy may be learned by a close observation of the operators' work by the chief operators and monitors, and by the use of listening circuits permanently connected to the operators' sets. It is naturally necessary that the use of these listening circuits by the chief operator or her assistants must not be known to the operators at the times of use, even though they may know of the existence of such facilities.
With a well-designed and properly maintained automatic equipment, the eight elements of good manual service reduce themselves to only one or two. Freedom from failure by busy lines and failure to answer are service-qualities independent of the kind of switching apparatus. Too great a percentage of busy calls for a given line indicates that the telephone facilities for calls incoming to that subscriber are inadequate. The best condition would be for each subscriber to have lines enough so that none of them ever would be found busy. This is the condition the telephone company tries to establish between its various offices.
In manual practice it is possible to keep such records as will enable the traffic department to know when the lines to a subscriber are insufficient for the traffic trying to reach him. As soon as such facts are known, they can be laid before the subscriber so that he may arrange for additional incoming lines. In automatic practice this is not so simple, as the source and destination of traffic in general is not so clearly known to the traffic department. Automatic recorders of busy calls are necessary to enable the facts to be tabulated.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
MEASURED SERVICE
In the commercial relation between the public and a telephone system, the commodity which is produced by the latter and consumed by the former is telephone service. Users often consider that payment is made for rental of telephone apparatus and to some persons the payment per month seems large for the rental of a mere telephone which could be bought outright for a few dollars.
The telephone instrument is but a small part of the physical property used by a patron of a telephone system. Even the entire group of property elements used by a patron in receiving telephone service represents much less than what really is his proportion of the service-rendering effort. What the patron receives is service and its value during a time depends largely on how much of it he uses in that time, and less on the number of telephones he can call.