It seems nowadays that for every company you call and attempt to make contact with a human person, you receive the recorded message, “We’re sorry, but we’re experiencing unusually heavy call volumes at this time. Your wait may be extended.” It doesn’t really matter what time of day you call them, they’re always experiencing unusually heavy call volumes.
My question is, is this an excuse for leaving you on hold for an extended amount of time because the company is too cheap to hire more call center reps? Or are they really experiencing an unexpected amount of calls?
Adam
I find that calls made before or after normal business hours (M-F, 9-5) to call centers are usually answered pretty quickly. Many are open on Sundays which I find to be the best time to call.
People call from work, primarily. 4-4.30 is busiest, with people calling before they head home for the day, even if the call center is open after hours.
I make all my calls late in the evening for order, inquires, etc.
Most call centers servicing their own paying customers should have an average speed of answer of 60 secs or less. Many shoot for < 30 secs.
Yep, it’s just a lie. It sounds better than ‘We aren’t going to pay enough people to provide proper after-sales support because that would reduce our operating profitability’. As others have pointed out, if you are thinking of buying from them for the first time or initiating a sales enquiry, you’ll generally find your call gets answered very quickly. Once they’ve GOT your money, they don’t care if you have to wait 20 minutes in a queue before anyone talks to you.
Former call center employee here. One other factor is that call center employees do sometimes need to attend meetings for training or whatever. They schedule those for times with low call volumes, but that often leaves a skeleton crew on the phones, so customers are still holding even during a low call volume.
In one call centre I worked at, the standard message said that they were experiencing “higher than normal call volumes.”
Basically, it was a small call centre, with one to four employees at any one time. If they were all on a call, or were busy and couldn’t pick up the phone right then, you’d get that message and be prompted to leave a message for us to call you back.
At least we didn’t keep them hanging around on hold for a long time though. And we did return calls as soon as we were able.
I’d believe that, except I’ve had to wait up to fifteen minutes to get through to our own friggin’ sales department, both on an internal and an external number.
Unfortunately the call volume shifts too. People discover that it’s nearly dead if they call at three pm on a sunday afternoon. So they start telling their friends to call at that time. Soon sundays are the busiest day of the week, and wednesday at eleven am is suddenly the quietest.
Also, the rostering teams have to try and roster to those constantly shifting call volumes, as well as fitting in things like team meetings and training for new/updated products. Unfortunately in order to get the rosters out in the mandated time so the phone-monkeys know when they’re going to be working, they sometimes overlook the fact that the call volume will shift, and you end up with days that are just blatantly understaffed, and times that are massively overstaffed.
Whoosh - that was a joke on Squink’s part I think. As in, 'they pick a time and date when nobody would possibly have been calling them, so that any greater call volume can be considered ‘high’. Nobody generally makes calls at 2:30 in the morning, not that many people had telephones or used them often back in 1893, most of these companies probably didn’t even exist in 1893, and telephone tech support hadn’t been invented back them.
If there’s a particular reason he picked september 23rd, I haven’t figured it out yet.
It’s likely that no company gears up to deal with maximum call rates, as it would mean either paying staff with far less to do at quieter times, and will need an internal exchange network that can cope with a larger number of calls, when for much of the time it will be working well below capacity.
Another option for a company would be to arrange its work patterns so that it has a large mumber of staff available at particular times of day, but the pattern may not be a daily one, it could have a cycle of maximums and minimums spreading across months, or in some cases perhaps just a few weeks in a year, other companies may experience call patterns that are not easily predictable.
So instead you queue, its cheaper for them, and your time is less expensive than theirs, or at least that’s how it appears to be from the behaviour of certain comapnies and agencies.
I do a considerable amount of work with the companies that install call answering and queue management systems. The “unusually high volume” message is a standard setup option.
Most call centers are run by twits. Call center scheduling is an art, and few have mastered it.
Queuing callers and carrying high answer speeds is a trap. Most call center managers believe it saves money. In fact, it costs money to have high abandon rates, pissed off callers and long waits in queue.
The problem is that most people suck at math. They then compound this inherent problem with not using workforce management programs properly to set staffing schedules that match staff to call arrival patterns. Call Centers that offer outstanding consistent service have mastered the engineering art of staffing/workforce management or simply overstaff all day (and who is allowed to do that…and even that does not work great).
Calls are funny…like road traffic or retail traffic:
Say a store is forecasting a slow slow slow day. Only 50 people will likely purchase something for the 12 hours it is open. You staff two people all day. For three hours, they sit there, watching tv, talking, etc. You peek in and see them with nothing to do. You are overstaffed. In 15 minutes, you peek back, and four or five people are in line, they are waiting and waiting…and they complain about how understaffed this stupid store is.
You peek back in 15 mintues, and no customers are in the store, and the two employees are doing jack.
You had four or five customers, and 75% would consider you understaffed. For 98% of the time that you had two people working the store, they were idle and you were overstaffed.
23 September 1893 was a Saturday, so many businesses with a telephone would have been closed that day anyway. (Of course, not many businesses then or now are open at 02:30 regardless what day it is.)
I’d say probably both. It’s something that the system is programmed to say when there are a lot of people on hold, or something similar. Doesn’t matter if it’s because of a genuine fluctuation, or because there are ALWAYS a lot of people on hold because they don’t care.
