If everyone you measure the number of calls you get is higher than the previous measurement then it is easily possible. Y’know day 1 you get one phone call, day 2 two, etc. Than you will consistently have higher volume than average… Technically
The nomenclature I always hear is, “Experiencing a higher than expected call volume,” and since no one can prove how low their expectations actually are there is no crack in which to insert the prybar of legal complaint.
“Marketing says our product is great and easy to use so we expect no support calls. Support is handled by our lead programmer Amir in India.”
So look, guys, it’s reaaaally easy:
If it isn’t mandated, regulated, and enforced by law, assume the corporation is lying.
Bonus Wisdom Save: If a corp says you should do something, strongly consider doing the opposite.
If it isn’t mandated, regulated, and enforced by law
and even then, dont be so sure…
Actually, 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
It sounds like something that happens regularly during an update to software with a lot of users.
This honestly sounds like it could be the basis for a novella
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 ?
The average is for a good, functioning call center. Their understaffed shitshow is experiencing more calls in relation to amount of staff than they are prepared to.
It’s still better to hear this lying message and then be kicked off than when they have you talk to the robot that tries to understand what you want but can’t and then ends up telling you what movies are playing right now in Singapore for some reason.
A steadily increasing curve would always be above its average, no?
Call center go brrrrrrrr?
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Call the Sales/new accounts line and see how long it takes them to pick up.
Technically true If they close the phone line at night.
If “your call is important to them” they would hire enough people to answer the phone.
It’s the average they calculated they’d get in order to allocate the minimum budget and personnel to what the “normal” calculation would be and only inconvenience the customer when it rose about that amount.
Not actually the average they get, the average they allocated min budget for normal amount.
It’s a higher average than the amount of calls they had 150 years ago.
Yeah but it sounds a lot better than “We’ve pursued a policy of understaffing go save costs”.
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.
Stop putting people on hold, period. We have the technology to just call back when they’re at or near the top of the queue. If they miss their call, maybe their number gets priority for an hour or something. Either way, when I get put on hold, I mostly fantasize about murdering whoever set up that system.
Yeah, it’s a feature dubbed “queued callback”. Saves your place, it’s a pretty common request. Customers like Delta, Intuit, Pacific Life, Citibank, Dyson, all use the platform I build (Amazon Connect) and do stuff like that.
Problem is, no one answers a call from an unknown number these days. Some phones are getting smart enough to recognize the number and show that it’s a business, though that’s more anecdotal evidence from my personal device (Pixel Fold with Google Fi carrier).
Hold for me and call screening on the pixel is amazing. It’s so much better than any other feature available on any other phone.
As someone who is also a phone system admin, if you had an older system, that feature was a pretty expensive feature to add on. We never purchased it because to buy what was needed to do it would’ve costed a ton. We did recently switch to a cloud pbx a few months ago and the one advantage I’ve seen is most of the high end features seem to be more readily available and cheaper when bundled with their packages so we finally got a lot of these options. RIP are the days of on prem systems.
I guess my point is I would imagine a lot of places still use older systems possibly and will wait as long as possible before upgrading and probably do not have the call back feature.
That’s a good point, a lot of people are still on old Avaya or Cisco systems and it was expensive to do that. A lot of cloud providers now don’t charge anything for it.
Yup, we were Avaya. Once Covid started, we looked into finally getting WFM and other features like this because we were a place that directly increased call volume due to covid but were unable to keep up with the amount of concurrent calls. We wanted to use the call back feature to help the agents who were overwhelmed and wouldn’t be able to get a large increase in help anytime soon. Especially since we knew these levels would only be temporary as well. In the end, it was not approved.
Take a number. Call back. Simple.
And then they start playing horrible, distorted wait music.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.
I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.
She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you
I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!
