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Comment by cydonian_monk | Hacker News Reader

I'm not 100% sure if it was intentional, but there was a span of time when AT&T's customer service queue (for land lines) behaved like this. You'd call in, your call would be placed on hold (with their terrible hold music), then if you hung up it would call you back when an agent answered your call. I only discovered this behaviour because one day I was fed up with waiting, hung up the phone, and then an hour or so later got the call back. Repeated this a couple times after that call and it worked the same way. I have no idea if that ever worked for their cellular accounts, or if it was peculiar to their land lines.

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It is a somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks, though I hadn't heard of one that did it automatically without your consent. The feature costs the company using it money, since they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.

Surely the incoming rates on a toll free number are higher than the outgoing rates for a regular call. I wish the call costs were large enough to move the needle - eg encourage the company to hire one or two more reps, which would drastically reduce the queue. Alas.

Besides the obvious business incentives (eg Comcast wants to make their phone experience as bad as possible), I'd guess the main obstacle holding this feature back is the specific PBX system a business is running on.

> they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.

It's probably a wash: their outgoing call to you costs as much or less per minute than their toll-free incoming lines. At least in North America where Calling-Party-Pays isn't really a thing.

In cellular plans that don't include long distance calling, it could cost you more to receive a call when you're out of your home area, while the same toll-free call is (usually) never long distance.

> somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks

Maybe on the sales side, but on the service side, many vendors (particularly b2c) prefer that you give up entirely and never call them ever again.

To give an example of the cost, Plivo[0]: Make call: $0.0065/min Recieve call: $0.0025/min Twilio[1] Make call: $0.0045/min Recieve call: $0.0020/min Flworoute[2] Make call: $0.00833/min Recieve call: $0.0050/min

So double to triple the cost from some providers for just this feature sounds very expensive. But perhaps with large commercial pricing this difference shrinks.

[0] https://www.plivo.com/sip-trunking/pricing/us/ [1] https://www.twilio.com/sip-trunking/pricing [2] https://www.flowroute.com/pricing-details/

You are right IIRC for most companies; my DID provider does charge incoming (toll/toll-free differing)/outgoing (flat rate) calls different rates.

That being said, are we not talking about AT-and-freaking-T? :) Surely they'll've been able to work things out. I think, anyway.

Yep. Surely the phone system costs for AT&T calling their own customers is so close to zero as to not matter even at telco scale, compared to the minimum wage they're paying the people on their end of the call.

(Also, isn't there some weird thing in the US where cell phone users get charged for _inbound_ calls? They might even make money on these...)

You missed the rates for receiving toll free calls, which are generally higher than both incoming and outgoing regular calls. For example, Flowroute is $0.00975/min.

The person you are talking to costs way more than that.

It cost less since they are not paying for the hold duration if they call you back when an agent is available.

I often wait 2-3 hours for a 5-10 minutes call.

I expect that the hourly rate for the CSR dwarfs the cost of the telecommunications, and efficiently allocating resources and being more convenient for the customer vastly outweigh a few fractions of a cent per minute cost.

A cellular company faces disconnects more often than others, and can plausibly attest that customers prefer to be called back when disconnected, since the company is the provider for disconnect support — when other companies might not be able to without permission.

It helps that they can link your caller ID conclusively to your account since it’s their own systems.

Working for a .edu in the UK, we do/have done this during Clearing[0], which is where prospective students who didn't quite make the cut can apply to empty spaces on the course(s) of their choosing. The user dials up our number, is placed into a queue and is told that they can hang up. They're still in the queue, and we'll dial them back when they reach the front. In our case it's profitable because we _want_ to talk to people on the phone, whereas sales departments might not want to talk to people who want to cancel their contract.

[0]: https://www.reading.ac.uk/clearing-explained.aspx

Bank of America (I think) once put me in a call-back queue instead of putting me on hold. It was really great, I wish more companies did it!

Probably wasn't the bank calling you.

You think so? I didn't blindly give them my account # or anything like that..

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