"Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed".
Anybody ever find themselves wondering "have they?"
or even worse "no they haven't" when it's a hotline you're familiar with
Anybody ever find themselves wondering "have they?"
or even worse "no they haven't" when it's a hotline you're familiar with
If you wait past that discouraging message, you get transfered to their support centre, and your call gets picked up in ~2-3 minutes.
That message is a blatant attempt to reduce the load on their customer support by discouraging callers and making it a painful to use channel.
This was my precise experience implementing analysis software, interactive telephony ("Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes") and going through the business case with senior management at an east coast call center ten years ago for a major consumer electronics and home appliance manufacturer, you probably have one of their smartphones in your pocket right now--call takers were saddled with what I thought were obscenely short call windows to resolve a call and be ready to take the next; three minutes to troubleshoot, diagnose and help a customer fix a washing machine, for example. One second over and the agents score went down, and they would face penalties.
What got implemented was a maze of menu options that (and I can say this authoritatively and quite honestly) were not captured beyond the second level to filter and properly triage calls into hunt-groups or queues, or even do any sort of business analysis to determine where the most of our calls were going, but were deliberately designed to give agents more time on their existing calls and keep the hold queue artificially small.
This is what exists at the root of my suspicion that this "menu options have changed" maneuver is all about numbers and stats that are ultimately meaningless in every practical definition that could be applied here.
--- parting note:
Ten years and a different telecom company later, I find myself staring at an email last week with the call center company's name on it, we've just signed a strategic partnership with them. Is it irony? Who knows. Am I chuckling morbidly? God yes.
For example, I recently had an emergency that I HAD to get in touch with a company, but kept being rerouted, re-advertized to, hung up on.
The emergency unfortunately was not handled in time.
I have no association with that site other than using it occasionally.
That explains why whenever I have to enter my account # or something over the phone, that information is never passed onto the human representative.
* Put people on a mandatory minimum hold of 15 minutes. Be explicit that they won't even enter the queue until then.
* Play ads the entire time. Not for their own service, just whatever.
* In between each ad have the message "press $RANDOM to continue waiting" and if you don't hear the right dial tone in the next 10 seconds just disconnect the call.
Alternatively:
* Charge $10 + $1/minute for phone support.
I bailed on the project. The last thing I heard is that they were still arguing over which "your call is important to us" message sounded the most sincere...