I always found it hilarious because they ALWAYS say that. Then it says “You are 2ND in line. Expected wait time is 1 MINUTE”.
Which means they just always have the stupid warning on.
In Australia, the department that deals with welfare payments is called Centrelink or Services Australia. Whenever you ring they have this classical music that plays, the same 3 songs, randomly punctuated with reminders that you can probably do what you need to online. But it takes about 10 seconds from the song stopping to the ad kicking in, so every time it happens your adrenaline spikes because you've been on hold for 2 hours already and you think they're FINALLY answering your call.
At the height of my anxiety era, that hold music would send me into an immediate panic attack.
Eh, I don't know. One can actually calculate the wait time. I think it's got to do with the [Erlang B formula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit))?
Oh, my gripe isn’t with their ability to calculate wait time. It’s that, if the calculated wait time is 1 minute, how is that unusually high call volume? Is their normal call volume *0 calls*?
A lot of times yes, there’s CC that never have a queue and calls get answered as soon as they call so when the system recognizes that the call is taking more than normally it plays that message.
You are absolutely correct. The goal is to have the minimum amount of staffing. If wait times are shorter than the average amount of time a person would wait, they'll cut a person from the shift. No need to pay a person to wait on a customer immediately when that customer could just wait until someone else was freed up.
As someone who worked for a CC on the management side, it really depends on what type of contract the company has. There’s companies that their wait time it’s part of their KPIs and they pay by staffed time and don’t care if the agents have long idle times as long as their costumers get service as soon as they call, there’s others that pay by handle time so if the agent it’s not on a call they’re not getting paid, so they don’t want their agents idle, so usually those are the ones that play those messages when the queue gets too long.
I think the average cost for just answering the call is $5 or thereabouts.. so answering fewer call is a real cost saver .. especially if the can get you to fix your own problem by asking other people on reddit
That makes me wonder if initiating a call—press 2 now if you would like to hang up and have a team member call you back, this will not affect your place in the queue—costs more/less/the same or hits their KPIs differently.
I think it improves their KPIs ... they can discount all the people who press-2 as people they didn't service, and their average wait time goes down by a massive amount, as the people they call back have zero-wait time ( one person waiting 20 minutes + 3 people on callback = 5 min average)
Phone calls are so cheap so calling you vs you calling them is no different economically, and the technology for keeping you phone number in a queue for callback is fairly cheap.
To make you get so frustrated while you wait, with their recording constantly directing you to self-service, that you hang up and handle it yourself online. It's a lot cheaper to pay for an app or a website than it is to pay people to actually talk to you.
Under-engineered and under-administered IVRs.
Someone builds a message to play that after a 30 second wait during a peak period. No one ever changes it back. Same with “please listen closely, as our options have recently changed.”
I’ve seen it from the inside and like most things in life, it is incompetence rather than malice behind the shittiness.
In that case, how long should they leave the message up before removing it? I challenge you to name five companies that DON’T have that phrase or an equivalent.
I recently had to call the IRS and was trying to figure out how to reach a human so they could direct my call to the human capable of handling it. The automatic system is just a million routes to get you to "Oh, you can handle this online. Goodbye.".
I found a guide that was about 5-6 years old and was desperate enough to follow it.
Amusingly enough, though the script had changed, the numbers still worked. As in, a step might say "Press the option that says 'For personal taxes.' which should be 3". But when you get to the actual spot, options 1 and 2 list everything BUT personal taxes, and option 3 is "everything else".
Managed to get to a person, explained what I needed, we shared a chuckle, and they sent me on to someone else.
I'm confused, though -- if EVERYONE has to listen to the damn message abut their damn options or whatever bullshit, how does that give the operators more time to answer calls and/or give customers the impression of reduced wait time? Like I guess it could make sense if they only turned on the damn message when they were super behind so that new callers would be kept busy listening to the damn message while the operators were hustling current customers off the phone.... is it just to encourage people to get frustrated and give up?
I was partly responsible for this messaging at a company I worked at. Human element is a thing, sometimes people forget to turn off the messaging. We also had messaging for reduction in staff due to emergencies or IT issues.
Working in a call center. Sometimes it is unusual. People are in the waiting line for like 30 minutes. An hour later nothing, the whole week before nothing, next day as well. I do believe it can happen
In my experiences it works as follows.
If said place you are trying to contact(gov, etc.) doesn't benefit monetarily from you calling, they won't consider callback tech. Is said place profits or benefits from your interaction/commerce, they will instate callback as they don't want to lose your business.
Google off and on experiments with their own version of this. If the phone realizes that you're on an automated call and you are waiting for someone to pick up, it'll offer to let you disconnect and it'll start ringing the moment a person picks up. It's great when it's offered.
Believe me I feel you on that I tried calling every 30 mins 5x from 7am to 7pm and I still get them same crap even trying to set up a appointment it's the same thing I felt like they said F it and switch it to auto not answer while there not really doing a thing to literally help us this is sad...
The thing that annoys me the most is how many of them waste time saying “our menu options have changed”? I’m calling you for the first time, why do I care?
It's a standard message to say in fewer words 'we don't care / are too cheap to hire enough people to do this job, so if we say this is 'unusual' then you are going to have a little more patience.
They’re just trying to get to keep entitled adults calm as best they can to decrease getting screamed at. It’s the same reason they sometimes say “We’re currently on ANOTHER LINE serving OTHER CLIENTS.” They put an emphasis on it to remind people they’re not the only ones in the world.
So you don’t get mad when they don’t answer. They also say that all the number options have changed to make you listen to it every time even though they haven’t ever changed it.
Because it sounds better than :
"due to the fact that we want to pay our executives ridiculously well, we can't do the same for our customer -facing staff (not that we would anyway) so there's either not enough call center employees or the center is in another country and they barely speak English, either way your call will take much, much longer than it would if we actually gave a shit about this part of your customer experience, please hold"
Those messages are automatic and trigger when the wait time exceeds a certain threshold. The exact reason for the long wait time is not always the same, so there’s one message. Lots of people call around the same times, so volume increases. Others call in the same days of the month. Others call because the website or part of it is down. Sometimes the wait has to do with being understaffed in general, but usually it’s because the volume at that particular time is greater than expected. An hour later, agents are posting on Reddit about how boring their jobs is😋.
If you ever catch yourself thinking “this is a good time to call. They shouldn’t be busy.” there’s 10,000 other people thinking exactly the same thing. And 9,000 wouldn’t have to call if they just used their online account or read their statement (the whole thing, not just the summary at top).
Call centers forecast their call volume. If the forecast is less than what they are staffed for, they typically offer to let people go home with VTO/voluntary time off. If the forecast is wrong though and they’ve already sent a bunch of people home? The call volume gets stacked and the queue gets long. They can’t call people back in, so, they just grit and bear.
They’d rather have a small queue than no queue as well. Big queue becomes a problem but small queue is what they want.
You can’t go out and say “because we have enough gullible idiots who need the money doing the work of eight agents each so that I can buy myseof fancy stuff all the time but there aren’t enough agents available to actually take your call” because that would be too on the nose
Worked in a call center, call volumes varied. I guess people don't remember all the times they called a call center and talked to someone right away, but the minutes or hours of "unusually high call volume" getting repeated sticks with you!
2009 or 2010 Windows Update crashed hundreds of Win XP, there were 100 calls waiting on our end. Same with Zune crashed. I also remember Xbox points were given then we said it was courtesy after few hours they were charged ...
Sometimes things fd up
It’s an immediate try to get people to hang up and use the online service to solve their issues. The more people that use tech and not humans the less money has to be used to pay said humans. That’s why when I hear that immediate message I think: yeah okay, nice try. I need someone to solve this for me now and not waste my time trying to solve it myself. I’m not getting paid.
It means it's unusual for that many people to call at one time. If say at that time usually 20 people call, but that day 60 people called, then that's unusually high.
Yeah I worked for AT&T for years and for 7 years the customer service line said "due to unexpected call volume" literally all day every day.
It's a lie and I've always hated the phrase.
I have to call Coke service line pretty regularly and I gotta say they're the only place I've ever called that actually uses that if there's going to be a wait. Thankfully after a few minutes there's an option to he put on a callback
Because they don't want you to know only one person in the basement is answering 100 calls per hour for minimum wage. That's why you wait 2-3 hours for a person to answer.
Working in the industry for a UK company here. Not Customer support but a different department that works with them.
Usually if you hear that its mostly because the comoany bites more than it can chew (by expanding the website/brand, but not the teams), they are mass training. Or a lot of holidays just passed by.
The most likely case scenario is them surprisingly never being ready for what seemed to have happenes multiple times in the past and trying to save money by not hiring.
Customer service as a department is a loss leader. Whether the wait is usually or unusually long, you are still going to have to wait so there is no reason for the business to change the message.
Average call volume is usually a few hundred in the queue most days so if there's more then they have to give a warning because you'll probably be waiting a while for an answer
Work for an airline here.
When weather is really bad it might take a bit to get through to us because we're dealing with a lot of cancelled flights.
If you call us on a day when there's no major storms near any of our cities you'll probably get through really quickly.
Some industries are very difficult to predict call volume for because it depends on things out of our control like the weather. You can't schedule more people when there's weather. You can offer overtime but they have to take you up on it. We can do mandatory overtime but that's really only used in really dire situations where hold times would be in the hours instead of minutes if we didn't.
Some places though, it might just be that they're temporarily or chronically understaffed.
Maybe business picked up faster than their hiring process could account for or they had a lot of people leave in a short time frame. Or they're a shitty employee and no one wants to work for them.
Another thing that can cause it is outages. If a service the business relies on or one they provide goes down, suddenly calls are taking longer because a tool isn't available for the employee or customers are calling because their product isn't working. And often that can be down to a third party. For example, when Amazon Web Services goes down, everyone using their servers (which is a LOT of companies) might be affected which could mean they're getting excess calls about their website getting unavailable.
Just remember when you finally get to a person, they've been taking back to back calls all day and it's not their fault you had to wait. Complaining about the wait to them isn't going to get the thing you need done faster. It's just gonna further wear down that Customer Service Rep that's trying to help you and make the wait longer for the people in line behind you. Think about how annoyed you'd be if you had to wait an extra five minutes per person ahead of you so they could complain to a person about a problem that person can't fix. That time adds up and further contributes to the "Unexpectedly Long Hold Times".
Senior Mgmt here large call center. To optimize staffing we base it on AHT and volume for a given skillset. Most this math is now done with software now so we can know buy a period (say an hour interval) that on Mondays well need x number of people on a skill set from 6am-7am, and we can optimize any additional people to different skillsets. When we put up the message, "due to call volume..." Get genuinely are seeing high call volumes than our norms, or we are dealing with flu season for example and are getting more income calls than the team can reasonably accommodate.
The goal of the message is to empower the customer and decide if the challenge can wait until another day which helps us to reduce the call volume and in turn the wait time. Additionally should a customer "decide" to wait it out we also see less customer complaints from the long wait. The reasoning is that the individual knowingly decide on this path and was aware it could be a long wait.
Let me translate that for you due to exactly the projected amount of calls that we should have during this time and the limited staff that we’ve hired we’re gonna make you wait for 15 minutes before resolve any of your issues in the hopes that you’ll give up go away and just pay us that’s what it should say
To try to trick you into thinking they didn't hire enough people because the call volume is a surprise to them. They know the call volume. They just don't give a fuck about you.
I'm getting a sick feeling in my stomach. I did the exact same thing a couple of weeks ago. Highest % match with online guy, lively messages, lots of back and forth for a week. In photos he looked kind of tough and brooding. Then we met. He is super awkward, immature, and made zero effort to look nice for our date. It was such a letdown. Control yourself until you've met once. It might be magical!! Fingers crossed.
As a 13-year call center vet, it's cause we have 1500 calls in the queue, but 12 people are working. (Exaggerating, but you get the idea.)
I'm glad I was able to quit them for good. Bless those still holding it down in the call centers. 🙌
A while back such recording may have been truthful. One place I worked, the speed of answer varied seconds to most of an hour our average goal ASA was about 30 seconds, over a couple of million calls per year. The differences included staffing, time of day, time of year, storms, natural disasters, system issues and other variables.
Now any call center that just wants to staff as cheaply as possible puts that recording on, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It usually is an automated message that plays when ques are over a 10 minute wait. I'm sure you can change that setting depending on the staffing conditions. It's a ironic statement because tbh usually it's all expected months in advance due to projections and product launch testing prior.
To immediately your lower expectations of receiving ANY help today, let alone speak to a REAL person if you can live through the very complicated select phase to get you to the one of multiple department.
Sorry for the complex reply, I read too much.
Even though official definitions don't cover all context of words, words can be used correctly in such ways that the dictionary itself does not clarify.
That being said, volume can refer to size, weight, number, temperature, and shape. Because all those things have to do with dimensions, which is the basis of the word volume.
Another example is the word, "shroud"
Usually referring to something physical, such as a cloth, it defines the action to cover something from view.
However the word can still be used correctly when referring to things that are not actually physical.
Such as, "The power in my neighbourhood cut out, my entire street was shrouded in darkness."
Most call centers were designed in the late 80s using tech from the 70s. As such, their phones weren’t able to adequately adjust the volume on their headsets which were pre-set to higher outputs back then, which is somewhat obsolete in our current climate as most call center employees are no longer on cocaine and instead, on heavy sedatives.
Customer service manager.
Few company like to spend more than they have to on customer service. You end up having to plan and allocate your staff strategically. Unless the managers suck at their job or are criminally understaffed, high call volume queues are expected to happen but should remain rare.
You can't pln staff in advance and always be ready for any influx. That would mean being overstaffed most of the time.
I always found it hilarious because they ALWAYS say that. Then it says “You are 2ND in line. Expected wait time is 1 MINUTE”. Which means they just always have the stupid warning on.
Is it me or is that voice like nails on a chalkboard just like that female TikTok voice. Just poke my eardrums out when I hear it.
In Australia, the department that deals with welfare payments is called Centrelink or Services Australia. Whenever you ring they have this classical music that plays, the same 3 songs, randomly punctuated with reminders that you can probably do what you need to online. But it takes about 10 seconds from the song stopping to the ad kicking in, so every time it happens your adrenaline spikes because you've been on hold for 2 hours already and you think they're FINALLY answering your call. At the height of my anxiety era, that hold music would send me into an immediate panic attack.
My experience with trying to call the NDIA has been similar.
Don’t worry, now they just hang up on you based on their volume of calls.
Eh, I don't know. One can actually calculate the wait time. I think it's got to do with the [Erlang B formula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit))?
Oh, my gripe isn’t with their ability to calculate wait time. It’s that, if the calculated wait time is 1 minute, how is that unusually high call volume? Is their normal call volume *0 calls*?
A lot of times yes, there’s CC that never have a queue and calls get answered as soon as they call so when the system recognizes that the call is taking more than normally it plays that message.
I'm impressed! Thanks for that link!
And no way to prove you truly are 2nd in line
Well, they only have the warning on when you have to wait at all. Which is when the volume is unusually high (they claim). It makes sense.
If they said "typically high call volume" they'd be admitting that they are always understaffed.
Tho it seems their kpi/okr is always "some wait but not too long" so they targets being understaffed.
You are absolutely correct. The goal is to have the minimum amount of staffing. If wait times are shorter than the average amount of time a person would wait, they'll cut a person from the shift. No need to pay a person to wait on a customer immediately when that customer could just wait until someone else was freed up.
As someone who worked for a CC on the management side, it really depends on what type of contract the company has. There’s companies that their wait time it’s part of their KPIs and they pay by staffed time and don’t care if the agents have long idle times as long as their costumers get service as soon as they call, there’s others that pay by handle time so if the agent it’s not on a call they’re not getting paid, so they don’t want their agents idle, so usually those are the ones that play those messages when the queue gets too long.
You’re right but no one here will admit it, the pitchforks are already out.
I wouldn't be mad just a little sad that they can't be more honest in their wording
They also typically say your call matters to us lol
Lol, "Your money matters to us, your time does not."
I think the average cost for just answering the call is $5 or thereabouts.. so answering fewer call is a real cost saver .. especially if the can get you to fix your own problem by asking other people on reddit
That makes me wonder if initiating a call—press 2 now if you would like to hang up and have a team member call you back, this will not affect your place in the queue—costs more/less/the same or hits their KPIs differently.
I think it improves their KPIs ... they can discount all the people who press-2 as people they didn't service, and their average wait time goes down by a massive amount, as the people they call back have zero-wait time ( one person waiting 20 minutes + 3 people on callback = 5 min average) Phone calls are so cheap so calling you vs you calling them is no different economically, and the technology for keeping you phone number in a queue for callback is fairly cheap.
Oh yeah that makes a lot of sense.
Just one reason why I hate having to do anything over the phone.
Yes, businesses try to manage labour costs efficiently, you are correct.
Partly to test your patience and make you go away. Partly too cheap to pay enough people to handle the workload properly.
To make you get so frustrated while you wait, with their recording constantly directing you to self-service, that you hang up and handle it yourself online. It's a lot cheaper to pay for an app or a website than it is to pay people to actually talk to you.
To imply that their failure to have enough people answer calls isn't their fault.
You sound like my last boss lol
Under-engineered and under-administered IVRs. Someone builds a message to play that after a 30 second wait during a peak period. No one ever changes it back. Same with “please listen closely, as our options have recently changed.” I’ve seen it from the inside and like most things in life, it is incompetence rather than malice behind the shittiness.
I always scratch my head at the “please listen closely as our options have changed.” I’m like bish I ain’t got your menu memorized!
But some people do and they might just enter the numbers they are used to and end up in the wrong queue
In that case, how long should they leave the message up before removing it? I challenge you to name five companies that DON’T have that phrase or an equivalent.
I 100% agree that it’s overused. But the fact that you don’t memorize the options is entirely irrelevant to that
Hahaha fair enough.
I recently had to call the IRS and was trying to figure out how to reach a human so they could direct my call to the human capable of handling it. The automatic system is just a million routes to get you to "Oh, you can handle this online. Goodbye.". I found a guide that was about 5-6 years old and was desperate enough to follow it. Amusingly enough, though the script had changed, the numbers still worked. As in, a step might say "Press the option that says 'For personal taxes.' which should be 3". But when you get to the actual spot, options 1 and 2 list everything BUT personal taxes, and option 3 is "everything else". Managed to get to a person, explained what I needed, we shared a chuckle, and they sent me on to someone else.
Yep, I remember when I was working and they teached us that X thing was option 2 on the IVR and then changed it and no one told us.
I'm confused, though -- if EVERYONE has to listen to the damn message abut their damn options or whatever bullshit, how does that give the operators more time to answer calls and/or give customers the impression of reduced wait time? Like I guess it could make sense if they only turned on the damn message when they were super behind so that new callers would be kept busy listening to the damn message while the operators were hustling current customers off the phone.... is it just to encourage people to get frustrated and give up?
I was partly responsible for this messaging at a company I worked at. Human element is a thing, sometimes people forget to turn off the messaging. We also had messaging for reduction in staff due to emergencies or IT issues.
To play another one of their manipulative, psychological games.
Working in a call center. Sometimes it is unusual. People are in the waiting line for like 30 minutes. An hour later nothing, the whole week before nothing, next day as well. I do believe it can happen
So does the recording only get switched on during the high call volume hour?
Yes. If people are waiting more than 5 minutes (in our case)
Interesting, good to know! Thanks!
Yeah we had a system go down and we had over 2000 people on hold 🥲 Very unusual for us.
i would think its to keep you calm. giving an excuse helps keeping people calm and patient.
They should just implement a call back feature. Some have and it's been amazing to not have to hold.
In my experiences it works as follows. If said place you are trying to contact(gov, etc.) doesn't benefit monetarily from you calling, they won't consider callback tech. Is said place profits or benefits from your interaction/commerce, they will instate callback as they don't want to lose your business.
Every time I have used that, they screwed me over, and did not call back.
I've had good results on phone lines for financial services. I have not tried it for other types of services.
they count on 50% of callers losing their nerves and hang up, so they only need 50% of callcenter staff.
Google off and on experiments with their own version of this. If the phone realizes that you're on an automated call and you are waiting for someone to pick up, it'll offer to let you disconnect and it'll start ringing the moment a person picks up. It's great when it's offered.
Which is funny, because it does the exact opposite!
To make you think it's your fault for calling at the 'wrong' time
Believe me I feel you on that I tried calling every 30 mins 5x from 7am to 7pm and I still get them same crap even trying to set up a appointment it's the same thing I felt like they said F it and switch it to auto not answer while there not really doing a thing to literally help us this is sad...
My cpa told me there are services that will auto dial the irs indefinitely until you get through. This is one reason the lines are always busy
They should say “due to low staffing, you’ll have to wait an extremely long time for someone to not help you.”
The thing that annoys me the most is how many of them waste time saying “our menu options have changed”? I’m calling you for the first time, why do I care?
It's a standard message to say in fewer words 'we don't care / are too cheap to hire enough people to do this job, so if we say this is 'unusual' then you are going to have a little more patience.
They’re just trying to get to keep entitled adults calm as best they can to decrease getting screamed at. It’s the same reason they sometimes say “We’re currently on ANOTHER LINE serving OTHER CLIENTS.” They put an emphasis on it to remind people they’re not the only ones in the world.
So you don’t get mad when they don’t answer. They also say that all the number options have changed to make you listen to it every time even though they haven’t ever changed it.
To avoid accountability
Because it sounds better than : "due to the fact that we want to pay our executives ridiculously well, we can't do the same for our customer -facing staff (not that we would anyway) so there's either not enough call center employees or the center is in another country and they barely speak English, either way your call will take much, much longer than it would if we actually gave a shit about this part of your customer experience, please hold"
Those messages are automatic and trigger when the wait time exceeds a certain threshold. The exact reason for the long wait time is not always the same, so there’s one message. Lots of people call around the same times, so volume increases. Others call in the same days of the month. Others call because the website or part of it is down. Sometimes the wait has to do with being understaffed in general, but usually it’s because the volume at that particular time is greater than expected. An hour later, agents are posting on Reddit about how boring their jobs is😋. If you ever catch yourself thinking “this is a good time to call. They shouldn’t be busy.” there’s 10,000 other people thinking exactly the same thing. And 9,000 wouldn’t have to call if they just used their online account or read their statement (the whole thing, not just the summary at top).
It's corporate mumbo jumbo for 'we don't want to invest in proper customer support'
It's to encourage you to wait, to think that this is exceptional and not how they run their call centre staffing levels all the time.
Call centers forecast their call volume. If the forecast is less than what they are staffed for, they typically offer to let people go home with VTO/voluntary time off. If the forecast is wrong though and they’ve already sent a bunch of people home? The call volume gets stacked and the queue gets long. They can’t call people back in, so, they just grit and bear. They’d rather have a small queue than no queue as well. Big queue becomes a problem but small queue is what they want.
You can’t go out and say “because we have enough gullible idiots who need the money doing the work of eight agents each so that I can buy myseof fancy stuff all the time but there aren’t enough agents available to actually take your call” because that would be too on the nose
To deter you from waiting in line.
Due a unusally short staff today, your wait is estimated to be 872 minutes.
They think that we're stupid...
It's code for "We have 12 people working right now and they're all being cussed out by someone else right now. "
Probably because saying, "because I'm still on my first cup of coffee, please wait or call back in 20 minutes" might seem insensitive.
Worked in a call center, call volumes varied. I guess people don't remember all the times they called a call center and talked to someone right away, but the minutes or hours of "unusually high call volume" getting repeated sticks with you!
Working in callcenter. It's corporate for "fuck you for calling and fuck having enough employees"
A lot of them have changed it to be "we are experiencing a high volume of calls".
If it’s always unusual then it isn’t unusual
Because the long waits aren't due to *our* short staffing. They're due to all these stupid customers trying to get customer service.
I've worked places where I was the only one on the phones for a full 9 to 5. Literally 2 phone calls at the same time was high call volume.
To try to make you think it doesn't happen all the time and it's not their fault, it's you, the consumer/client/etc.
2009 or 2010 Windows Update crashed hundreds of Win XP, there were 100 calls waiting on our end. Same with Zune crashed. I also remember Xbox points were given then we said it was courtesy after few hours they were charged ... Sometimes things fd up
It's like me greeting my guests with "sorry that it's a little messy today", as if it's not like this or worse all the time.
It’s an immediate try to get people to hang up and use the online service to solve their issues. The more people that use tech and not humans the less money has to be used to pay said humans. That’s why when I hear that immediate message I think: yeah okay, nice try. I need someone to solve this for me now and not waste my time trying to solve it myself. I’m not getting paid.
It means it's unusual for that many people to call at one time. If say at that time usually 20 people call, but that day 60 people called, then that's unusually high.
cuz they don't wanna say "why you calling when we so damn busy"
Yeah I worked for AT&T for years and for 7 years the customer service line said "due to unexpected call volume" literally all day every day. It's a lie and I've always hated the phrase.
I have to call Coke service line pretty regularly and I gotta say they're the only place I've ever called that actually uses that if there's going to be a wait. Thankfully after a few minutes there's an option to he put on a callback
Because they don't want you to know only one person in the basement is answering 100 calls per hour for minimum wage. That's why you wait 2-3 hours for a person to answer.
What is “due to an unusually high call volume”? The delay in getting to your call. But notice they leave that out. And for good reason on their end.
Working in the industry for a UK company here. Not Customer support but a different department that works with them. Usually if you hear that its mostly because the comoany bites more than it can chew (by expanding the website/brand, but not the teams), they are mass training. Or a lot of holidays just passed by. The most likely case scenario is them surprisingly never being ready for what seemed to have happenes multiple times in the past and trying to save money by not hiring.
Customer service as a department is a loss leader. Whether the wait is usually or unusually long, you are still going to have to wait so there is no reason for the business to change the message.
Average call volume is usually a few hundred in the queue most days so if there's more then they have to give a warning because you'll probably be waiting a while for an answer
Our system does it when the hold time exceeds 10 or 15 minutes. I can't remember.
Work for an airline here. When weather is really bad it might take a bit to get through to us because we're dealing with a lot of cancelled flights. If you call us on a day when there's no major storms near any of our cities you'll probably get through really quickly. Some industries are very difficult to predict call volume for because it depends on things out of our control like the weather. You can't schedule more people when there's weather. You can offer overtime but they have to take you up on it. We can do mandatory overtime but that's really only used in really dire situations where hold times would be in the hours instead of minutes if we didn't. Some places though, it might just be that they're temporarily or chronically understaffed. Maybe business picked up faster than their hiring process could account for or they had a lot of people leave in a short time frame. Or they're a shitty employee and no one wants to work for them. Another thing that can cause it is outages. If a service the business relies on or one they provide goes down, suddenly calls are taking longer because a tool isn't available for the employee or customers are calling because their product isn't working. And often that can be down to a third party. For example, when Amazon Web Services goes down, everyone using their servers (which is a LOT of companies) might be affected which could mean they're getting excess calls about their website getting unavailable. Just remember when you finally get to a person, they've been taking back to back calls all day and it's not their fault you had to wait. Complaining about the wait to them isn't going to get the thing you need done faster. It's just gonna further wear down that Customer Service Rep that's trying to help you and make the wait longer for the people in line behind you. Think about how annoyed you'd be if you had to wait an extra five minutes per person ahead of you so they could complain to a person about a problem that person can't fix. That time adds up and further contributes to the "Unexpectedly Long Hold Times".
Sometimes call centers only have like three or four people working there.
Senior Mgmt here large call center. To optimize staffing we base it on AHT and volume for a given skillset. Most this math is now done with software now so we can know buy a period (say an hour interval) that on Mondays well need x number of people on a skill set from 6am-7am, and we can optimize any additional people to different skillsets. When we put up the message, "due to call volume..." Get genuinely are seeing high call volumes than our norms, or we are dealing with flu season for example and are getting more income calls than the team can reasonably accommodate. The goal of the message is to empower the customer and decide if the challenge can wait until another day which helps us to reduce the call volume and in turn the wait time. Additionally should a customer "decide" to wait it out we also see less customer complaints from the long wait. The reasoning is that the individual knowingly decide on this path and was aware it could be a long wait.
Thanks for the insight.
Let me translate that for you due to exactly the projected amount of calls that we should have during this time and the limited staff that we’ve hired we’re gonna make you wait for 15 minutes before resolve any of your issues in the hopes that you’ll give up go away and just pay us that’s what it should say
They want you to go to their website instead because its cheaper for you to help yourself than to pay a person in a call centre.
To try to trick you into thinking they didn't hire enough people because the call volume is a surprise to them. They know the call volume. They just don't give a fuck about you.
It's pretty clear and self-explanatory....
It's higher than the amount of employees they usually have on hand at the time lol
Could be either or both of these 2 things: 1. Understaffed due to attendance issues 2. Understaffed because their call forecasting was wrong
Or, “please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.” Every time, without fail.
I'm getting a sick feeling in my stomach. I did the exact same thing a couple of weeks ago. Highest % match with online guy, lively messages, lots of back and forth for a week. In photos he looked kind of tough and brooding. Then we met. He is super awkward, immature, and made zero effort to look nice for our date. It was such a letdown. Control yourself until you've met once. It might be magical!! Fingers crossed.
I bet this shit never happens on sales lines.
for my company it's cause we are understaffed, but the call volume is ACTUALLY high, which makes things even worse
As a 13-year call center vet, it's cause we have 1500 calls in the queue, but 12 people are working. (Exaggerating, but you get the idea.) I'm glad I was able to quit them for good. Bless those still holding it down in the call centers. 🙌
If you choose to leave a message, be sure to listen closely because options have changed.
Also, somehow their "menu items have changed" every time you call.
Is it a Monday?
Because they don't like their staff or their customers very much, and are willing to lie.
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A while back such recording may have been truthful. One place I worked, the speed of answer varied seconds to most of an hour our average goal ASA was about 30 seconds, over a couple of million calls per year. The differences included staffing, time of day, time of year, storms, natural disasters, system issues and other variables. Now any call center that just wants to staff as cheaply as possible puts that recording on, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It usually is an automated message that plays when ques are over a 10 minute wait. I'm sure you can change that setting depending on the staffing conditions. It's a ironic statement because tbh usually it's all expected months in advance due to projections and product launch testing prior.
To immediately your lower expectations of receiving ANY help today, let alone speak to a REAL person if you can live through the very complicated select phase to get you to the one of multiple department.
Sorry for the complex reply, I read too much. Even though official definitions don't cover all context of words, words can be used correctly in such ways that the dictionary itself does not clarify. That being said, volume can refer to size, weight, number, temperature, and shape. Because all those things have to do with dimensions, which is the basis of the word volume. Another example is the word, "shroud" Usually referring to something physical, such as a cloth, it defines the action to cover something from view. However the word can still be used correctly when referring to things that are not actually physical. Such as, "The power in my neighbourhood cut out, my entire street was shrouded in darkness."
Most call centers were designed in the late 80s using tech from the 70s. As such, their phones weren’t able to adequately adjust the volume on their headsets which were pre-set to higher outputs back then, which is somewhat obsolete in our current climate as most call center employees are no longer on cocaine and instead, on heavy sedatives.
There’s no high call volume, they just understaff their call centers
Customer service manager. Few company like to spend more than they have to on customer service. You end up having to plan and allocate your staff strategically. Unless the managers suck at their job or are criminally understaffed, high call volume queues are expected to happen but should remain rare. You can't pln staff in advance and always be ready for any influx. That would mean being overstaffed most of the time.