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secret 10 characters
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And I can easily picture them saying “well, nobody else has complained…”
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A few quick things I need to pound out:
- Do not tell me you are experiencing “higher than normal” call volume. You cannot say this at all times of all days.
- Do not tell me you have recently changed your options. You have not.
- Do not tell me this is a one-time code. I know I am going to be looking for my phone every time I try to access this thing for the foreseeable future.
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It’s the standard phone bank message, of course. But it may also mean “we aren’t prepared to pay enough to get more than a bare minimum of people in here to do this soul-destroying job”.
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Occasionally I get through straight away, but I’m sure there are many people working out exactly how long a customer is prepared to wait on a phone and employ just less than that number of people
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I used to support an (internal) application for a phone company. We had two ways to reach our hotline by phone. One was to dial a phone number directly. The other was to call an 800 number, punch in through four or five levels of menu, and get us. We had been at the prompts we were at for four or five years when I started. When I left, several years later, we were still getting calls for things that used to be that set of prompts.
Figuring out how long people will wait on hold is big business. Some people want to minimize dropped calls, others want to maximize it. (if you make people call to cancel their service, if you keep them on hold long enough, maybe they’ll pay for another month! Who cares if they hate you, they’re a paying customer.)
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No, I used to be directly in support of the customer care division for my company. It was something like $7 every time a customer connected to an agent. We really were undergoing constant gyrations in the order and definitions of buttons to try to drive self service for questions like resetting passwords (50% of call volume). We even went so far as to call outbound our most frequent callers, once a week, during low hours just to see what they were struggling with (often they were lonely and customer care was the human connection they had - that’s dark).
Hold times under a minute, first call resolution, all that was tracked daily.
So I get it and maybe it’s that getting it that drives me nuts. I know what they are trying to do and I wish they would just be transparent about it.
Oh, and that’s the kicker. “We’re sorry, we’re experiencing higher than av— Hello? This is Steven how may I help you?”
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A friend of mine worked on AOL tech support Back In The Day (late 1990s); their main metric was calls taken per shift, so the moment someone had a complex problem they’d get “accidentally” disconnected.
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I used to work for Dixons Group, recruiting for their flagship call centre in Sheffield. They had the same metric but (to be fair) they did have a special team that had slightly different metrics that more complex problems were usually handed off to.
Recruitment was a nightmare - I used to run assessments centres 5 days a week, twice a day. If they were full, I could be interviewing 16 people a day!
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Wasn’t sure where to put this so here it goes.
I found out today that a colleague has been writing Fantasy books for the last decade. He turns his D&D adventures (with other members of the office) into novels.
Not a big fantasy fan but I’m curious.
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The leaves rustled in the breeze as the four, dark wanderers trudged through the ancient, once well-trodden, but now fallen into disrepair, trail on their unending quest to answer the question on all of their minds.
A loud voice, as though a trickster god itself spoke to the four friends, the booming voice echoing off the far-distance mountain sides. “Roll for initiative!” it spoke from afar and yet seemingly no further away the length of an average table, the three most terrifying words known.
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2000 lb unexploded bomb found a few hundred metres from our house this morning. We are assured the fuse, which is intact, has now been capped and it is “safe”.
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Brings Hot Fuzz memories back…
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My sister, who at the time worked in real time police intelligence, once told me that a metal detectorist had found an unexploded shell/bomb, loaded it into their car, drove to a pub then called the police about it.
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That’s an impressive amount of idiocy.
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There was a case here a few years ago. Someone bought a building, found a crate of hand grenades in the basement, took one of them somewhere to show it off, and had someone point out “dude that’s a 70year old nazi grenade “.
A previous owner had stashed his war spoils in the basement. A couple dozen German grenades, a ‘machine gun’, bunch of small arms, and oodles of ammunition.
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It’s generally self-correcting.
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The problem is if you were passing by when the correction occurs…
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