“Your call is very important to us… but not so important that we would actually do anything about it like hiring more representatives. This message will repeat every 5 minutes until you get frustrated and hang up.”
Yeah but it sounds a lot better than “We’ve pursued a policy of understaffing to save costs”.
I sell and build call centers for a living.
Yeah, it’s fake lol. I mean maybe for some businesses it isn’t fake, but usually clients would ask us to make it where “if there’s more than X calls in queue, play the message”. Turns out, there’s always more than X calls in queue. It’s not actually looking at the average.
It’s kinda weird, some things are just always like that, some things clients want to add in because the average user expects it.
Someone wanted a repeat caller to get bumped to the front of the queue. Literally encouraging the “if I hang up and call back I’ll get there sooner” people. Awful.
Stop putting people on hold, period. We have the technology to just call back when they’re at or near the top of the queue. If they miss their call, maybe their number gets priority for an hour or something. Either way, when I get put on hold, I mostly fantasize about murdering whoever set up that system.
Yeah, it’s a feature dubbed “queued callback”. Saves your place, it’s a pretty common request. Customers like Delta, Intuit, Pacific Life, Citibank, Dyson, all use the platform I build (Amazon Connect) and do stuff like that.
Problem is, no one answers a call from an unknown number these days. Some phones are getting smart enough to recognize the number and show that it’s a business, though that’s more anecdotal evidence from my personal device (Pixel Fold with Google Fi carrier).
Hold for me and call screening on the pixel is amazing. It’s so much better than any other feature available on any other phone.
And then they start playing horrible, distorted wait music.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.
I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.
She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.
It depends on their window.
If they include call volume data back to the Neolithic period in their calculations, then yes, call volumes are higher than average (the average being 0.001 calls per century, rounding up).
Pretty sure that’s how they do the math.
It’s even simpler. A strictly increasing series will always have element n be higher than the average between any element<n and element n.
Or in other words, if the number of calls is increasing every day, it will always be above average no matter the window used. If you use slightly larger windows you can even have some local decreases and have it still be true, as long as the overall trend is increasing (which you’ve demonstrated the extreme case of).
It’s even simpler. They just lie about and always say it’s higher than average.