“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.”
The joke’s on them - my time has very little value anyway
Ugh I still have an air conditioner that was dead out of the box (bought it off season so didn’t use it till summer…summer 2020)
Tried a bunch of times to call in but “due to the pandemic” (what a fucking catchall for anti-consumer behavior…if a huge company hadn’t figured out how to keep their call center staffed 5 months into it, then it’s clearly intentional), nobody ever answered the call in the hour or so I’d wait on hold, several times.
I eventually gave up and just ate the cost.
That’s what it’s all about, saving on overhead and the percentage of people who give up. Its not just corporations to, ever sign up for any public assistance? You WILL be denied to see if you will give up.
Maybe I will give up when the draft happens. The 1% can defend its own country, it’s clearly not ours.
Interestingly, British consumer rights guru Martin Lewis is currently running a crowdsourced data gathering exercise on this in the UK.
The purpose being to identify if companies are purposefully playing these sorts of message no matter their actual call volume. (Which we all know they are, but this will help prove it)
Call the Sales/new accounts line and see how long it takes them to pick up.
Makes sense if the average includes the hours of zero calls when their phone line is closed
Especially if it’s one of those awful ones that are only open for 5 minutes on the fifth Wednesday of the same month.
Read here: all utilities and banks in America. Oh you want to call and talk about something important regarding your natural gas bill or mortgage? Call between 10am and 4pm Monday-Friday to talk to one of our dedicated Sri Lankan representatives. Oh you work during that time? Good, that’s the point lol
Also: “Please listen closely as our menus have recently changed.”
because I call the customer service line of any one company so much, that I have memorized their touch tone menu
9 months into my daily call to Maytag: Excuse me, babe. I have to walk into the other room so I can listen. Apparently, they’ve changed their phone menu.
Technically true If they close the phone line at night.
Once a year they receive negative a billion calls on a day that is later erased, and it really skews the average
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.
So the length of the queue is the expected average, right? Then, if you fall off that you are therefore the above average call in the message… except the length of the queue probably doesn’t actually much to do with any kind of average of the number of calls.
Yeah but it sounds a lot better than “We’ve pursued a policy of understaffing to save costs”.
Well, aaaactually, don’t they have more than average calls half of the time?
Not necessarily. They could be constantly ever so lightly above the average value, but then once in a while, a really low value comes along and drags the average down. What you’re thinking of is the median.
Easily achievable if you only take calls in working hours. Then all working hours will have more than average calls per hour for a day.
You can also continously have above average per worked hour for the staff if you keep firing people, because then calls per person keeps going up
Yeah, like at night it falls down to 0
That would be true for the median, but not for the average
Sure you can. If the average is over 24 hours, then any time the phone line is open they’re getting higher than the average number of calls. X2 if you include weekends and holidays.
Found their lawyer
It’s a higher average than the amount of calls they had 150 years ago.
A steadily increasing curve would always be above its average, no?
Call center go brrrrrrrr?
I’d imagine they include their off-hours in the ‘averages’.
“So crazy that we’re getting more calls when we’re open than when we’re closed!”
^probably this.
Eehrm, acktually, the tweet is wrong 🤓
You can always be getting a result above average in a series of numbers as long as the nth number is significantly greater than the previous ones. For example, f(x) = x^2 would always be above average for every next number
I like the idea of an infinitely exponentially growing base of users seeking help from some poor call center
This honestly sounds like it could be the basis for a novella
It sounds like something that happens regularly during an update to software with a lot of users.
if it is considering the average for all of history, then the rate of change would just have to be consistently greater than 0, right ?
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