So I’m on hold waiting for my corporate help desk. I don’t mind putting the line on speakerphone and getting other work done to the sound of pleasing classical music.
However, they make an announcement “All analysts are currently helping other customers…blah…blah…blah” every THIRTY SECONDS.
This is grating.
Is there a practical need for this (I’m not being sarcastic here)?
Are there industry guidelines about this?
Do they choose an intentionally short interval so that it annoys callers and the less dedicated folks simply give up?
In my mind, as long as I hear music playing, I understand I’m on hold. There is no need to tell me I’m on hold. A discrete announcement every three or four minutes with an estimated hold time might be nice, but otherwise I don’t need a message.
Worse still when a company provides a max hold time, where they say “you have been on hold too long. Good bye.” after wasting fifteen minutes of your time. What is the intended purpose of this, other than annoying people?
Most call centers use call abandonment as one of the evaluation criteria, so encouraging you to hang up would not be a good thing.
I agree with you, though, that frequent interruptions just to remind me I’m on hold are annoying. The worst ones are the ones that sound like someone’s answering the phone. You hear a click like you’re getting transferred out of the on hold queue, only to be told you’re still on hold.
Yeah, I hate this too. If they’d just play music, you could do something while you’re on hold. Instead it’s blah blah blah, often mixed in with some kind of ad.
Agreed - I think it’s intended to show that they really care about your call and are getting to it ASAP. Well, I kind of assume this is true of any company that I might want to do business with - if not, why are they in business? Fully agree that it is very annoying, particularly when it is a nice piece of classical music that gets interrupted at an inconvenient moment (i.e. any time other than the end - or at least, a cadence!).
I have come across it once or twice, but only with an answerphone message (i.e. if the phone isn’t answered after (say) 4 minutes, it defaults to answerphone). These answering services claim to call you back within (for example) 2 hours, but IME that simply guarantees that they will call at a much less convenient time than when you wanted to speak to them, and often you get the wrong department anyway. The reason behind this tactic, of course, is so that the company can report that all calls are answered within 4 minutes, overlooking the fact that this system is much less efficient and creates a lot more work for the staff.
This is only one of a whole flock of extremely annoying phone practices that drive me right up the wall. To me, the worst are those damned voice-activated things where they ask a huge number of questions, most ov which are irrelevant. At least with them, I have found if I keep yelling “representative” or “agent” I will get a human being far quicker than going through their stupid menus.
And, as to the OP, if they value our business so much, why in hell don’t they hire more people so you could get a human to answer the phone at once? Those were the days.
And the other thing that really infuriates me is when they say “press 1 for English.” I don’t mind it a bit when a recored messages comes on in Spanish giving a number to press, but as English is still the predominate language spoken here, I usually just hang up, unless it is some place I have to reach.
Of course it is no use complaining to the rep you (hopefully) get eventually, as they could care less.
That seems rather illogical. You don’t mind if there is a message in Spanish saying that the person should press a number for Spanish, but you do mind if there is a message in English saying that the person should press a number for English?? As long as the message is interruptible having a “Press 1 for English” at the start of the recordings will get things going faster than having a “<however you say ‘Press 1 for Spanish’ in Spanish>” followed by “Press 2 for English” at the start of the recordings.
I think the idea is that they should assume you speak English unless you otherwise specify. They should just say <Press 2 for Spanish>, and then just continue on as if you speak English.
Unless you’ve talked to these people before, it’s not going to be any faster to list English first, as you didn’t know you had to press 1 in the first place.
Usually, it’s the music that makes we want to hang up, but I guess these interruptions are worse. It reminds me of the "new"CBC that has a guy with a used-car-salesman voice breaking in every 15 or 20 minutes interrupting the music to announce some other program that I probably don’t want to listen to.
Often Spanish isn’t the only language offered, so the choice is not between “Press 2 for Spanish and stay on the line for English” (which still would take longer than “Press 1 for English” since the sentence is longer and the system has to give you an opportunity to press it). The choice is between “Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish, Press 3 for Vietnamese, etc.” and … well, a long list of languages and “Stay on the line for English” at the end.
Way back before Travelocity and Expedia, I called American Airlines to make a flight reservation and was immediately placed on hold. What was interesting were the incrementally higher level of announcements that I would get while I was waiting. For instance, after the third or fourth “we are currently serving other customers” accouncement, I heard something like, “We are very concerned about the amount of time you’ve been waiting. Please rest assured that you will be served as soon as possible.” Eventually, I got what was probably the ultimate announcement, something like, “This is [whoever it was], president of American Airlines. I just want you to know that your wait time is completely unacceptable to me. I wish to personally extend my apologies and promise that I will get to the bottom of this as soon as possible.”
It still took me about 30 minutes to reach someone.
On an unrelated note, what I hate are the “Please pay attention as we have recently changed our options.” Bullshit.
As someone who works on phones let me inform you that people have this really shitty habit of all calling at the same time. At my workplace for example, prime time tends to be 5pm. There are 900 offices forwarding their phones to us, 400 workers checking in, 2500 real estate agents trying to set up showings and hundreds of other callers just checking to see if the office is still open… And this little circus is managed by a dozen people at the most.
I know what you’re going to say- hire more people. But this rush of calls lasts an hour at most, at which point the calls drop off sharply. People don’t like coming to work for an hour and then being told to go home. At the wages my workplace pays it’s kind of impossible to make a living that way.
Man, that’s one tough titty you’re sucking on at your company. You’ve got a logistical nightmare–calls coming in a predictable non-uniform manner-- and you’ve got to figure out a solution to this vexing problem–so you come up with “Fuck the customer”? Good one!!
The part that pisses me off? When you’re asked to enter some number to verify your identity, as when VISA begins their automated call by asking you to punch you entire 16-digit credit card number–when you get a live person on the line, what’s the first bit of information they ask of you?
You got it. That self-same 16-digit number.
Lately, I’ve taken to not understanding why they’re asking for for that number again, and I’ve gotten real good at pretending not to understand how they don’t already have it.
“What’s your credit card number, sir?”
“Oh, I just gave that to you.”
“Yes, well, we need it again, sir.”
“Why don’t you look at your record of this call? I just punched all sixteen digits into the phone, about five minutes ago.”
“Yes, I understand, sir, but I can’t see that number.”
“You can’t?”
“No, sir.”
“That doesn’t make much sense. I mean, I gave that information to your company, didn’t I? And they siupposed to use cutting edge technology. Wouldn’t you think that it would be easy for that to make that data, that I just provided, available to you? I mean, they must know that you’re going to be needing it, don’t they?”
“That’s a good point, sir, and I’ll have to pass that along to them, but in the meantime, if I could just…”
“Wait, do you mean to tell me that this is the first time anyone has ever suggested that you can use the 16-digit number provided by a customer to tell what that same customer’s 16-digit number is? I find that very hard to believe.”
And on and on. Hey, if they can waste my time, I can waste theirs, can’t I?
You cannot staff to 100% of the call volume 100% of the time. So, you queue people.
Go somewhere and find a way to not wait in line… ever.
It’s not queuing people that is inherently bad, but there are ways to place people on hold and make it less painful. When running a call center, there is a fine balance between hold times and abandon rates. Sometimes, you have to take it on the chin and have a few minutes of hold time and some abandons, just like you have to have people get in line at WalMart, the bank, a ball park or an emergency room (and they KNOW the busy hour in an ER… and the busy day of the year. Still you wait.).
So, waiting for a rep on the phone? It makes business sense.
Also… Why ask for the 16-digit card number again? Well, some systems are setup to check that you are an actual customer, by doing a d-base dip and confirming your card number and which call group (or even agent) should assist you. Then you are routed to center X because you are customer type Y, but the card number is not sent to the desktop and delivered simultaneously with the call because that involves CTI development, and some companies do not see that as a worthy investment.
Most people choose credit cards for reasons that go far beyond call center experiences. Believe me, if securing customers meant boosting call center experiences and investing more in agents and CTI, it’d happen. But many banks would be pissing away money and making their products more expensive if they over invested in technology that had no impact on the business.
The common consumer is zombified by fancy ads and gimmicks. This gets customers. If there were some serious connections to the strength of the customer service center and overall customer retention and sign-up rates, that’s where the money would be spent. So, thank the mindless drones of consumers who get zombified by ads and gimmicks they’ll never use, because that is where the money will be invested.
This has always been my assumption, and I don’t let the redundant question get under my skin.
However…
Couldn’t they hire some human interface whiz to come up with a very concise polite sentence that tells people something like “Please enter your 16 digit account number so we may route your call to the correct center. For your security, this information is not passed through to the phone worker”
My example is a bit wordy and doesn’t explain it very well, but there are geniuses out there that could, with a little effort, write a spiffy phrase that would make pseudo’s experience nicer.
They should say something like that, and they CAN. I did not argue about any of the dumb things, like bad use of in-queue messages, or clicking sounds that confuse the caller.
My approach is to keep people informed.
I learned from travel how to keep people happy when waiting… Like waiting for take off. Man, it gets soooo much easier when the pilot comes on and says, “There are four planes ahead of us, and we expect to be off the ground in 12 minutes”. Then, “We’re next. Be off the ground in a few minutes…” That is a short 12-minute wait to me.
You give me nothing for 12 minutes and it is painful.
A caller on hold for two minutes just needs info. I agree with a bunch of the complaints. And yes, if you tell people you will re-verify the account number for quality assurance or for security, they don’t even blink.
Your example reminds me of a flight from Newark to Atlanta some years back that was weather delayed for two hours. We sat on the tarmac listening to the periodic updates from the cabin, getting antsy, but not too annoyed.
Then the captain came on and said “Folks, I have bad news for you. In about eight minutes the crew is going to pass the FAA deadline for mandatory rest. If we aren’t off the ground by then we aren’t going.”
About six minutes later he came on and said “Folks, fasten your seatbelts. We just got approval from the tower and we’re going to go for it!”
We then gazed out the windows in amazement as we taxied past fifteen or twenty parked planes, cutting to the head of the line and then took off as quickly as I have ever experienced. I think the wheels left the ground with five seconds to spare.