When you’re on hold for customer service, why do they interrupt the music as often as every 30 seconds to play a recording that says “Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold. Your call will be answered by the next available customer service representative.” I was in queue for 30 minutes today, and had to listen to that message 60 times. Wouldn’t once, or even once every 5-10 minutes suffice?
I would expect that the frequency of these little reminders is studied somewhat by experts in that area. Every thirty seconds is probably a bit much, but every one or two minutes is not unreasonable.
The problem with waiting on a phone is that you feel powerless to affect your situation. You don’t see other CSR’s scurrying arround helping others; you don’t see how many people are ahead of you in line; you can’t even throw a screaming fit to get attention. You’re just left sitting…there…for…ever…and…ever…and…ever.
My personal favorite is the announcement that “the approximate wait time is X minutes”. At least then you can decide if you want to invest that amount of time. The wait time prediction, however, should be reasonable close to reality however. I called DirecTV and was told that the wait time would be fourteen minutes. Fine. An hour and ten minutes later, I hung up. The prediction only added to my frustration.
Anyone know the URL to that website with the “secret” numbers to press to get to an actual human at various large companies?
I think the answer is in your post. You sat there for 30 minutes. If you had not heard anything for 5-10 minutes, maybe you wouldn’t have hung on for so long. These guys use these methods to save money, some of which is no doubt spent on research to see how many idiots like you - and many of the rest of us - will hold on to a phone that is playing recorded music that we have not chosen, in order to ask a question that we shouldn’t even have to ask, or to complain about a matter that their money-saving ways have induced. Argh - don’t get me started. xo, C.
Five or ten minutes without hearing any reassurance that your call hasn’t been lost can be a really long time. Of course, I figure that if my call were truly important to them they’d hire enough people to answer it without my having to wait more than five.
sometimes alternating with the “you’re call is important to us” message are mini commercials for the company’s product, so at least you get a variety of annoying things to listen to. Also some companies have musak or a local radio station; their “please keep holding” messages are spaced further apart (a minute or a minute and a half) because they believe the active playback will indicate they haven’t disconnected you inadvertantly
a lot of companies have two choices - pay barely more than minimum, get inferior staff, and risk calls being dropped or ignored OR outsource the call center so that you talk to someone in some foreign company with an accent so thick as to be unintelligible 60% of the time
the turnover in the average call center is very high since it is a lousy job, so keeping the staff at full capacity is a challenge to say the least
Here ya go:
I used to work in that business. There’s a third alternative. Train your people well, pay them well, and keep your customers really happy so you get a lot of repeat business. Ours was a small call center (typically around ten people), and in the last two years I was there, we only had one person leave or get fired.
in a large company (like mine) where the call center staff averages 300 (over 500 with outsourcing) on any given day, those that have been well trained move out of CustSvc into another department (usually billing support or collections) or up into middle management as quickly as possible. It is the rare individual who actually likes being yelled at by disgruntled consumers
Well, I guess it depends on what kind of call center you’re talking about. Ours was technical support, and we looked for people who liked helping others solve problems. If a customer got abusive, all of our employees were instructed to immediately (and politely) transfer the call to a manager.
We did have employees transfer out of the call center to other departments from time to time, but that didn’t bother me much. I was still keeping valuable and well-trained people in the company.
Generally, I didn’t consider a tech support employee to be really up-to-speed until they’d been with the company for a year, so I went to great lengths to keep them once we started their training. Six years after opening the call center, I still had four out of the original five employees working there, although one was writing documentation for us instead of answering calls.
“Your call is important to us.” Is the title of a book by Laura Penny. It is subtitled: “The Truth About Bullshit.” You have to read it to appreciate how we are bombarded with it day in and day out from radio, TV, bill boards, newspapers, etc. etc.
If it was really as important to them as it is to us they wouldn’t put us on hold and feed us that line of BS!.
I know the principal of a small business who has a BS phone answering system with a spiel to start, then asks you to enter the extension of the person you wish to speak to, then/or enter the initial of the person for access to their phone line. All the while a girl sits on her laurels filing/polishing her nails or otherwise killing time. He thinks he’s a big shot and big time. Never gets it that those in the know know he’s the big sh_t.
Does that answer your question?
This got me thinking; are there such things as on-hol music systems that allow the caller some choice in the selection of music?
I can’t remember which company I was on hold with (probably either Dell or Sprint) but after calling several times over a couple of days it became apparent to me that the Reassuring Message [sup]TM[/sup] were becoming more and more spread out. First two were about 20 seconds apart, then it was 45, then a minute, then 2 minutes, etc. Actually made me kind of interested.
Oh, hear hear!
My vet has some ringtone playing Mozart’s ‘Eine kleine nachtmusik’ when I’m on hold.
It sure is the worst piece of ‘music’ I’ve heard in ages.
I’d prefer no music at all. Would that be possible? Just a beep now and then, to show you’re still connected?
Someone telling funny jokes?
Someone telling UNfunny jokes?
I’d be happy with just some choice in the volume of the music on hold. I often have my own music playing, and don’t want to hear their selection playing over top of mine. Sometimes theirs is so loud it distorts and I have to hold the phone away from my ear. Then every time their “we care about you” message comes on, I think someone answered and yank the phone back to my ear only to get blasted again with distorted music.
I love the “please listen to the following choices as they have recently changed”, when they haven’t changed in 2 years.
When I hear that line, I press zero. Many times, it gets me to a live person. Sometimes, I wind up going in the same loop as before, but it’s worth the try. xo, C.
This seems to be key. If you will be holding for 2 minutes, 30 seconds is a reasonable interval for the reassuring message. If you will be holding for 30 minutes, 5 minutes may be a reasonable interval. They need a little algorithm in there that adjusts the interval, which it sounds like Dell or Sprint or whoever may be playing around with.
In addition to some marginal cost to add the feature, my guess is it will be slowed down in corporate America where big shots will be aghast and unbelieving that hold times really will reach 30 minutes with current staffing levels and product quality, and commission studies to prove that’s impossible, thus delaying the implementation of such an algorithm.