Now the Brazilian president signed a decree that imposes new regulations for call centres (source). If you have ever suffered in the hands of poor service delivery through call centres then get ready to feel avenged. You’ll love this!

From 31^st July 2008 all companies that provide the following services (amongst others) will have two months to adapt their call centres to the new legislation:

• telephony;
• communications;
• water supply;
• electricity supply;
• terrestrial transportation;
• airline transportation;
• financial services (including credit cards); and
• health insurance.

The new legislation enforces the following decrees:

• The decrees were divided in five groups: access, quality, transparency, cancelation (of services) and general rules;
• For services of uninterruptible supply (e.g.: water and electricity, cable TV and telephony), all call centres must be available 24 hours, 7 days a week;
• Companies must provide a unique FREE phone number to attend their variety of services;
• A customer call can only be transferred once from one customer care operator to another, in order to ensure that customers don’t have to overly repeat their issue;
• Customers have the right to request a case history in order to track the resolution progress of their query;
• Customers must have the option to override a telephone based menu at any time and request to speak with an operator;
• Service cancelations must take effect immediately; and
• Companies that fail to follow these regulations could be fined to a sum of up to R$3,000,000.00, in accordance with the Código de Defesa do Consumidor (Consumers Defence Code).

Now can you imagine if companies such as BT and Sky ever had to follow a similar decree? One can hope, if ever…

However, the authors also righteously assert that Brazil is not yet a superpower and that there is yet a lot to be done – particularly with regards to the public sector, infrastructure and the bureaucracy faced by organisations. This is the last bit I would like to stir some thoughts about.

I do think massive reforms are needed in regards to corporate legislation. But while Brazil should look around and learn from the experience of other successful economies in what to do, I think it is mostly important to learn what not to do. Let me develop on this thought.

I’ve been living in Europe for over eight years, and I have noticed organisations doing things in here that they simply wouldn’t get their way with in Brazil, particularly with regards to employment laws and consumer rights. What I mean is that although Brazil has problems, they can get much worse if Brazil just open its market to foreign investments by simulating other economies, without taking into considerations the singularities of the Brazilian market.

In the Canadian documentary “The Corporation“, a psychological profile is drawn upon American corporations as if they where physical human beings. Following this premise, the documentary illustrates how organisations tend to display a psychotic and egocentric profile. The documentary asserts that the main issue with corporate legislation in the USA is that it allow organisations to act like individuals within the constitution, whilst there is no single individual that could be taken into account for all the actions perpetrated by the organisation. The bottom line is: who is the culprit when an organisation crosses the line of ethical behaviour? Now imagine a country like Brazil with all the problems it still has to overcome, full of psychotic organisations.

Well in Brazil companies are also seen as individuals. You have pessoa física and pessoa jurídica (i.e.: physical individual and juridical individual). But there are also strong laws with regards to consumer rights and employment rights, and having lived abroad for over fourteen years and being a constant traveller interested in foreign markets, I am yet to see legislations on these matters that would match those of Brazil’s. Foreign companies really find a hard time in Brazil when trying to implement some of its questionable domestic practices. I always giggled when I read on Brazilian newspapers that yet another European telecom got its ears pulled by the Brazilian ombudsman due to some of their shenanigans, like trying to penalise customers for switching mobile networks.

I the UK, I have seen two page employment contracts, in which employees would be bound by a dozen pages “employee handbook”. This often means organisations can change the contents of their “employee handbook” from time to time and the employees are automatically subjected to its terms by proxy. I have even seen extreme example of an employee handbook attempting to override the laws of the land, in whicn an organisation was cheeky enough to put a clause in its employee handbook which stated that “if a crime was committed within the organisation premises, employees were forbidden to inform the police and they should inform a member of the board instead”.

What I also love in the UK is the fixed term contracts that state that the given organisation can change the terms of its contract at any time they want without prior notice. Picture this: You sign a contract for a TV subscription service for a period of twelve months. Months after you signed the contract, the service provider decides to raise its prices in 25 percent. You can’t get out because you are bound on the terms of the original contract. In Brazil, as soon as the organisation makes a change in the contract to which customers disagree, customers would be able to pull out of the fixed-term. In the UK, you would have to go to court in order to prove your rights.

So I DO think reforms in company legislation is a must for the Brazilian economy. But as chaotic and crazy it can be for a foreign company to establish itself in Brazil nowadays, in a (not so perfect and totally incidental) way this Babel tower of bureaucracy has kept the country safe from being on the mercy of corporatism — We have enough problems already!