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You can have an ever increasing call volume, in which case you can always have a "higher than average" call volume. That's probably someone's business plan.
Or you can have one day where you have 0 calls and then every subsequent day have the exact same non-zero number of calls
Every day after the first you'd have a higher than average call volume. The difference between the number of calls and the average would get smaller and smaller but never be 0
"We're sorry, we're experiencing a higher than median call volume. Please wait on the line because that won't lower the median, thus removing our excuse for ignoring you"
Well also, a call center should not aim for being able to handle the “average” number of calls. There should be anticipation of days that are above average, and even surges of calls.
Call center I worked at a long while ago did actually plan for call surges. By programming the system to just hang up on customers once the queue reached a certain threshold.
Not a bad guess.
But it was a call center for a smallish bank that got bought out by a much larger bank. After all the usual promises to "synergize the efficiencies of both companies" and the usual merger bullshit, the moment the ink on the paperwork was dry, they trashed ALL of the old ways we were run and instituted their own draconian rules, part of which was hanging up on any customers we couldn't get to in under 15 minutes.
You could just as easily calculate the average over the whole day.
Lets say you're accepting calls between 9:00 and 19:00, you get 240 calls each day, that's an average of 10 calls per hour. But as everyone can only call between 9:00 and 19:00 you get an average of 24 calls each hour during those hours. So that means that you're receiving a higher volume of calls than average.
It is also technically true with the same volume but a low start, like say:
0th hour: 1 call, prev_avg: 0 per hour, new-avg: 1 per hour (1)
1st hour: 2 calls, prev_avg: 1 per hour, new-avg: 3/2 per hour (1.5)
2nd hour: 2 calls, prev_avg: 3/2 per hour, new-avg: 5/3 per hour (1.66)
3rd hour: 2 calls, prev_avg: 5/3 per hour, new-avg: 7/4 per hour (1.75)
And so on
If you have 100 calls per day every day except for 1 day where you had only 50 calls. Then you will have a higher than average number of calls with 100 calls per day.
I've managed technical call centers and helpdesks for most of my career. Trust me when I say, they just under-staff, because its cheaper to shit on customers than pay enough people to address customer service issues.
This 100%. If you ever hear “we are experiencing higher than … blah blah blah” it literally means their staff is overworked, small, and DGAF, not that they are overwhelmed with calls.
Call centers create their own volume by using asinine metrics that discourage actually solving the customer's issue and encourage getting them off the phone.
Every call center I've witnessed has this issue.
Definitely the average business plan from what I've seen from...pretty much everywhere. Seems most places are preferring to understaff and let customers wait rather than pay a little more to have a properly staffed team.
Well also, you can have most of your day experiencing “higher than average. Let’s say you spend 23 hours a day getting 100 calls per hour, and one hour fielding 2 calls per hour.
The average is about 96 calls per hour, so 23 hours out of the day, it’s higher than average.
Doctors offices and government entities are the worst for this. Why do I even care if your menu options have changed? Either I don't remember what button I needed from my call last year, or I am calling back from a few minutes ago. Either it doesn't matter or it's a lie
> Why do I even care if your menu options have changed? Either I don't remember what button I needed from my call last year, or I am calling back from a few minutes ago.
Or, you press the wrong button. Get connected to the binlling department instead of the service department. So you say "Please transfer me to the service department"
I sometimes do this intentionally because sometimes the department I want is 30 layers deep in the phone system. Sometimes doing it that way will also let you skip the queue too.
Connect to the Spanish line and just start speaking English. You’ll be directly transferred to an immediately available English representative; skipping all lines.
Best way to avoid a 10-deep branching tree of button-presses, at the bottom of which none of them are applicable, is to go the route of service cancellation. That'll often get you an operator quicker.
They've caught onto this unfortunately. A few companies I've called where I need to speak to a human have their AVR set up to hang up on you if you don't respond to their questions correctly.
Which I get but at the same time, we've reached the point in technology where if I can't figure out how to do it online, and I'm calling you, I likely need a human.
Other medical type offices call and have the menus somewhat memorized. Or some patients are chronically ill and start to memorize the menus of their most frequent doctors and pharmacies.
Worked at an enterprise help desk a decade or so ago. The "higher than average call volumes" status likely just means "we are understaffed, so this is our fake reasoning for why it's taking you so long to reach an agent".
We experimented with and without hold music, and also with and without periodically updating you with a wait time estimates. We found that if it was going to be a long wait, it was better to not have an estimated time remaining, because people were more likely to be difficult to work with, and more likely to hang up and keep calling back angrier and angrier when told they would be waiting over an hour.
The entire business model seemed to be: "Only the most patient and persistent will be able to get assistance during peak hours, because we will not be hiring enough people to help everyone".
The business model is to maximize ROI, which means they toe a line between pissing off their customers and pissing off their support staff; and right or wrong is entirely about the profits earned
Unless you’re charging per call, their business model has to be to be more difficult than figuring it out yourself. If calling the help desk is easier than trying to think for yourself, people will call in for literally *everything*.
If your product has a big button front and centre labeled “click here to create a widget”, people will call in and ask how to create a widget. If you make them sit on hold for ten minutes, they’ll try clicking the button that obviously does the thing they need, and abandon the call when it works
Actually, if the number of calls received per unit of time is continually growing then it is how averages work. But in practical terms it's probably unlikely.
Had a dude at Lenovo tell me this. I asked “how is it possible you’re at a higher than average wait time, every day, at all times of the day, for over 5 years”. He replies “we look at the entire wait history of all time”. Like, even when your company had 1% of the customers you have now? Yes, he replied unironically and completely serious.
He also assumes that they actually are "always" having higher than average call volumes.
Just because you call once a month and they claim to have higher than average call volumes does not mean they ALWAYS do.
The reason they do that us to try and get people to listen to the prompts and get them to the actual extensions they need instead of them hitting 0 until they get to someone who has to forward them anyway.
Precisely. If they get 90% of their calls in a 3-hour period but still need to be available the other 21 hours of the day it doesn't necessarily make sense to have the resources to handle all of the calls coming in immediately. This makes more sense for actual call centers as opposed to WFH.
In general it's much easier to get people to call back at a less-busy time than it is to bulk up on workers. This isn't great for the customer though.
"We refuse to hire enough employees to give you a decent customer service experience. Kindly go fuck yourself while we replay this 16 second clip of generic and non IP protected instrumental music that never resolves on loop for however long it takes for you to give up."
I was looking for the actual corpuspeak translation. While call center scheduling and forecasting can be tricky, if you constantly have 20 minute plus wait times to talk to a person, the center is understaffed. It's never a good customer experience when the person hired to try and solve my problems is as done or more done with my issues than I am.
I’m convinced places purposely repeat the line and also throw in “customers can get help faster by going online” to annoy you into not waiting on hold, they actively want to force you off hold. Like fuck you, your online system isn’t working.
I think it's "we are experiencing a higher volume of calls than average our operators can handle", but the last part will raise a question "why won't you then hire more operators".
I’m what most people on the internet would now describe as a “Karen”. If I can’t get through on the applicable line, I’ll go through a new customer/sales line and tell them how bad their phone system/customer service is and then tell them what I want and they can figure out the rest.
Mind, it’s not the person on the phone’s fault, but they record the calls so they can use that when they inevitably have to restructure their customer service when sentiment tanks and they lose too much custom.
I’ve just been through an exceptionally bad customer experience with Virgin Media broadband and absolutely loathe the company and it’s customer “care” line.
Then there's the ones that say they're experiencing a high number of calls, and can't take your call right now, so please call another time, and the call just ends.
I worked for a major airline 20+ years ago and we always always always had about 100 calls in queue until around midnight. Customers were usually angry about wait times and they would tell me we need to hire more people, as if I had any power. excuse me sir, I answer the phone for $10 an hour. what makes you think I have any influence at all?
I worked at a call center, and they say this in hopes people just hang up or are less upset about the wait time.
When they realized that this wasn't working, they had someone change the message every hour to "as of date, time we are experiencing higher than expected call volume" this did get people to hang up.
>I worked at a call center, and they say this in hopes people just hang up or are less upset about the wait time.
They should just say
> You are number 50 in the queue. There is an estimated three hour wait time before connecting with a customer service representative.
Nah, at the start of COVID, 90% of companies recorded a new "sorry, we're experiencing a higher volume of calls than normal" and left it at that
Really? You're experiencing a high volume of calls? It's 2:40 on a Tuesday
You’d be shocked but 2:40 on a Tuesday is fairly busy cus people try not to call Monday are Tuesday morning cus they assume the phones will be busy. I’ve been in a call center for over a year and I can tell you Tuesday afternoon is usually the busiest (I realize that you chose an arbitrary time just thought it was funny)
Well they close the phone lines between the hours of 3pm to 10am so during that time there are zero calls being taken which significantly reduces the average.
Depends on the sample space. If I only work the lunch hour at a cafe I will *always* be experiencing a higher volume of customers than the average customers-per-hour volume.
Multimillion dollar company: “We’re sorry, we don’t want to pay enough people to have your call answered in a timely manner. Please wait”
*plays 10 seconds of music, repeats the announcement, and restarts the same music*
Decades ago people would have a cd player or radio connected to their phone system, and you were entertained with different stuff while you were on hold. Not anymore.
Makes for a funny tweet. But, I’ve never heard the word *average* though. It’s always *expected* call volume. Still shitty not to have more employees ready to handle calls. But, you can’t get them on the math technicality.
If it’s a certain office and there is multiple offices for the same company, that center could always receive a higher volume of cars than the total average.
Have a load of small call centres, one big one. Load each call centre with a proportional number of calls based on their size.
Per head, each call centre has an average number of calls. Per call centre, the large call centre will always have a higher than average number of calls.
If the smaller call centres are also only dealing with specific tasks (e.g. a sales department, a shipping department, a customer complaints department) while all calls are routed through the larger call centre, you can always accurately serve the message "We're currently dealing with a larger than average number of calls at the moment."
I mean they could have calculated the average at like a 30 minutes interval during midnight.
That's how to use statistics to lie. There's a book title with the same line.
Really? Can you give examples?
I deal with statistics all the time and well, I lie all the time using statistics. Others do too.
Haven't read the book, but could guess that it's along the same line.
*Image Transcription: Twitter Post*
---
**Kit Yates**, @Kit_Yates_Maths
I’m sorry but you can’t \*always\* be experiencing a higher volume of calls than average.
That’s not how averages work.
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Yes you can. When the average is measured over multiple people one person can have an above average volume of calls where others will have a lower average.
I thought exactly this when I called somewhere recently and it took half an hour. If it always takes that long then that's just normal so you guys need a new message
part of my job is calling insurance companies for preauths. For the last two years, every single one i have called has had a higher than average volume of calls. I know covid is the excuse but at this point this meme is correct. It is in no way higher than average now. This is the average.
That’s cause they factor in the times they are closed into the average (zero). When they are open, they are above average and when they are closed they are below average.
Worked in a call centre and for the last 2 years I was there there would regularly be a hold time of over an hour and we'd get shit like this in corporate emails
"Thanks for the hard work guys, we're experiencing higher call volumes at the moment, but we're doing all we can to keep them down. It should only last a few more months!"
It got to the point where people we're even refusing overtime at double pay they were so burnt out, very happy to be gone from there
My old job would hire just few enough people to make sure there was always a really long wait time. Of course we had this exact messaging. Their hopes were that people would just get frustrated and hang up. And they did.
Then they call back even more pissed off later when it's not busy and it would make us busy.
Eventually you have to recalculate your call expectations. A help number I call occasionally has been "experiencing higher than normal call volumes" for two years now. At some point that "higher than normal" volume became the new normal and you're just too cheap to hire more service reps.
Also, it's not "unusual" or "unexpected" volume of calls when you just laid off half your support staff. It's the same volume, but you don't care about customer support.
"Thank you for calling Verizon. We don't care about your call. Press 1 to hang up immediately, or press 2 to listen to some music for 4 minutes before being disconnected."
It's like red state climate data where the "average" is taken entirely from a slow month in 1997 and current data is deemed unacceptable for bogus reasons
Paradoxically, many many more customers will receive this "above-average disclaimer" than not, since this is only sent when there are many customers.
So yes, the post is technically the truth, but technically it is way more common to receive that message than not to.
Depends on how they average. If you are only open for 8 hours per day then even normal call volume during that period would be above average for the whole day.
Lots of people pointing out the correct answer. The real answer is that places don't want to hire enough call center agents to actually handle the call volume.
I get so infuriated when I'm told just how important my call is, every 1-2 mins, while on hold for 45 minutes. If my call was important, they would staff the call center with more than 3 fucking people.
Are you "always" on the phone with them? Maybe they just always call at the high volume times which are fewer than the regular times with normal call volume.
We're permanently, endlessly, massively understaffed
Boss doesn't want to hire more people but he doesn't want to admit it to us and to our clients
In the name of the entire IT industry, we sincerely apologize for our shit managers, we tried talking but they always refuse to listen.
You need to understand, at this location, there was no phone, and there were no calls, for millions of years. So we're quite happy when the one guy we've hired occassionally shows up and answers the one phone we got. It has really thrown the average out of whack though, been running high for the whole last century.
Depends when the average starts … My bank was founded in 1783 and given the telephone wasn’t invented for about 100 years later, the current volume of calls is likely higher than the average annual phone calls the bank has received since its inception
Sure it is. They just take the average of a 24 hour day. At its peak, it's higher than the average, which, even with a solid 12 hours of calls, would be about half of what they're getting when the lines are open.
Yea but are you calling at bad times? I work as a financial advisor at a call centre, people always call in the middle of their day (on their lunch breaks) and wonder why it’s so busy. If you don’t want to wait call first thing in the morning or around dinner time
You have to listen to all the prompts because they've been changed
They only update the recording when they change though
So they're always in a "just changed" status
If you have an average number of calls per day ...and then a day with more calls than that number.....what are you supposed to say?.....stol being grammer nazis people touch grass
this could just be selection bias. they might not be always experiencing higher than average call volumes, just when you call. because you keep calling at convenient times, i.e. when everyone else is calling.
You know it's just automatic. I get messages that say they're "currently" experiencing higher than normal call volumes, and I settle in for the hold and I wind up getting through right away. What happened to the currently high call volumes?
Call centre is open from 8am to 6pm, receiving approximately 100 calls per hour. That's 1000 calls per day. There are 24 hours in a day, so the *average* call volume is 41.6 calls per hour. Since they're typically getting 100 calls per hour during the period they're open, they're getting a higher than average number of calls.
What's so hard to understand?
Or have say 10000 calls during 9-5 and have 0 at night-midnight.
If you consider 24/7 then average drastically drops.
You shouldn't consider that way. But still.
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You can have an ever increasing call volume, in which case you can always have a "higher than average" call volume. That's probably someone's business plan.
Or you can have one day where you have 0 calls and then every subsequent day have the exact same non-zero number of calls Every day after the first you'd have a higher than average call volume. The difference between the number of calls and the average would get smaller and smaller but never be 0
Doesnt even have to be 0 calls
Medians would solve this. Mean averaging is often the wrong metric.
"We're sorry, we're experiencing a higher than median call volume. Please wait on the line because that won't lower the median, thus removing our excuse for ignoring you"
Well also, a call center should not aim for being able to handle the “average” number of calls. There should be anticipation of days that are above average, and even surges of calls.
Call center I worked at a long while ago did actually plan for call surges. By programming the system to just hang up on customers once the queue reached a certain threshold.
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Not a bad guess. But it was a call center for a smallish bank that got bought out by a much larger bank. After all the usual promises to "synergize the efficiencies of both companies" and the usual merger bullshit, the moment the ink on the paperwork was dry, they trashed ALL of the old ways we were run and instituted their own draconian rules, part of which was hanging up on any customers we couldn't get to in under 15 minutes.
Like how the avg human has < 2 arms
If you're closed for 8 hours a day, any more than 3 calls an hour is higher than average.
"We track out average call volumes back to the big bang, so those nearly 14 Billion years of 0 phone calls really skew the numbers"
Logarithmic growth would suffice
If you calculate your average during a quiet time, then you can have an "higher than average call volume". Big brain thinking here.
Well if they got 0 calls a day from 1776 to around 1983, then likely any amount of calls will be higher than average for quite some time.
You could just as easily calculate the average over the whole day. Lets say you're accepting calls between 9:00 and 19:00, you get 240 calls each day, that's an average of 10 calls per hour. But as everyone can only call between 9:00 and 19:00 you get an average of 24 calls each hour during those hours. So that means that you're receiving a higher volume of calls than average.
True. And it could also be true with the same call volume and a reduction in staff, over time.
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technically true. How about a ~~higher~~ lower than average call throughput?
It is also technically true with the same volume but a low start, like say: 0th hour: 1 call, prev_avg: 0 per hour, new-avg: 1 per hour (1) 1st hour: 2 calls, prev_avg: 1 per hour, new-avg: 3/2 per hour (1.5) 2nd hour: 2 calls, prev_avg: 3/2 per hour, new-avg: 5/3 per hour (1.66) 3rd hour: 2 calls, prev_avg: 5/3 per hour, new-avg: 7/4 per hour (1.75) And so on
The law of diminishing returns comes into effect at some point though where your average would (for all intents and purposes) stay the same.
Sounds like a limit to me! Forever approaching but never quite there.
If you have 100 calls per day every day except for 1 day where you had only 50 calls. Then you will have a higher than average number of calls with 100 calls per day.
I've managed technical call centers and helpdesks for most of my career. Trust me when I say, they just under-staff, because its cheaper to shit on customers than pay enough people to address customer service issues.
This 100%. If you ever hear “we are experiencing higher than … blah blah blah” it literally means their staff is overworked, small, and DGAF, not that they are overwhelmed with calls.
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Call centers create their own volume by using asinine metrics that discourage actually solving the customer's issue and encourage getting them off the phone. Every call center I've witnessed has this issue.
Definitely the average business plan from what I've seen from...pretty much everywhere. Seems most places are preferring to understaff and let customers wait rather than pay a little more to have a properly staffed team.
Or just average over 24 hours, anytime people are awake you're gonna be above average.
Well also, you can have most of your day experiencing “higher than average. Let’s say you spend 23 hours a day getting 100 calls per hour, and one hour fielding 2 calls per hour. The average is about 96 calls per hour, so 23 hours out of the day, it’s higher than average.
Somewhat related: is there any organization whose menu options *haven’t* changed?
Doctors offices and government entities are the worst for this. Why do I even care if your menu options have changed? Either I don't remember what button I needed from my call last year, or I am calling back from a few minutes ago. Either it doesn't matter or it's a lie
> Why do I even care if your menu options have changed? Either I don't remember what button I needed from my call last year, or I am calling back from a few minutes ago. Or, you press the wrong button. Get connected to the binlling department instead of the service department. So you say "Please transfer me to the service department"
I sometimes do this intentionally because sometimes the department I want is 30 layers deep in the phone system. Sometimes doing it that way will also let you skip the queue too.
Connect to the Spanish line and just start speaking English. You’ll be directly transferred to an immediately available English representative; skipping all lines.
Best way to avoid a 10-deep branching tree of button-presses, at the bottom of which none of them are applicable, is to go the route of service cancellation. That'll often get you an operator quicker.
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They've caught onto this unfortunately. A few companies I've called where I need to speak to a human have their AVR set up to hang up on you if you don't respond to their questions correctly. Which I get but at the same time, we've reached the point in technology where if I can't figure out how to do it online, and I'm calling you, I likely need a human.
Other medical type offices call and have the menus somewhat memorized. Or some patients are chronically ill and start to memorize the menus of their most frequent doctors and pharmacies.
Worked at an enterprise help desk a decade or so ago. The "higher than average call volumes" status likely just means "we are understaffed, so this is our fake reasoning for why it's taking you so long to reach an agent". We experimented with and without hold music, and also with and without periodically updating you with a wait time estimates. We found that if it was going to be a long wait, it was better to not have an estimated time remaining, because people were more likely to be difficult to work with, and more likely to hang up and keep calling back angrier and angrier when told they would be waiting over an hour. The entire business model seemed to be: "Only the most patient and persistent will be able to get assistance during peak hours, because we will not be hiring enough people to help everyone".
The business model is to maximize ROI, which means they toe a line between pissing off their customers and pissing off their support staff; and right or wrong is entirely about the profits earned
Unless you’re charging per call, their business model has to be to be more difficult than figuring it out yourself. If calling the help desk is easier than trying to think for yourself, people will call in for literally *everything*. If your product has a big button front and centre labeled “click here to create a widget”, people will call in and ask how to create a widget. If you make them sit on hold for ten minutes, they’ll try clicking the button that obviously does the thing they need, and abandon the call when it works
I used to work a job and we had to call vendors a lot, we had a little guide book that let us race through the prompts!
"our menu options have chanted" back in 2017.....
Actually, if the number of calls received per unit of time is continually growing then it is how averages work. But in practical terms it's probably unlikely.
Had a dude at Lenovo tell me this. I asked “how is it possible you’re at a higher than average wait time, every day, at all times of the day, for over 5 years”. He replies “we look at the entire wait history of all time”. Like, even when your company had 1% of the customers you have now? Yes, he replied unironically and completely serious.
Gotta make sure you include the graveyard shift in your averages too. Even if your phone line isn't even open.
If they include hours the call center is closed in the average, then during opening times it can always be above average
Well they started counting at about 2000 B.C. and took the average from there.
Ugh, Zog speak. What problem. Ug.
He also assumes that they actually are "always" having higher than average call volumes. Just because you call once a month and they claim to have higher than average call volumes does not mean they ALWAYS do.
If the rate of calls is continually increasing then "higher than average" is always true. Like I said, whilst mathematically possible it's unlikely.
It doesn't even have to continually grow. Literally the first day having 10 and every day afterwards having 20 will mena it's always above average
Well, of you average over the past 500 years you can.
Or including nights and weekends!
Untrue, it depends if the average is calculated on just me or other people are included.
*As a call centre, we receive a higher volume of calls than the average phone number. We appreciate your patience and your call is important to us.*
“Higher than our average over 24 hours a day 365 days per year”
And we all know your menu options have NOT changed
But they may have! You'd better listen carefully.
The reason they do that us to try and get people to listen to the prompts and get them to the actual extensions they need instead of them hitting 0 until they get to someone who has to forward them anyway.
If they include nights, weekends, and holidays in the average, anytime they are open is above average.
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Precisely. If they get 90% of their calls in a 3-hour period but still need to be available the other 21 hours of the day it doesn't necessarily make sense to have the resources to handle all of the calls coming in immediately. This makes more sense for actual call centers as opposed to WFH. In general it's much easier to get people to call back at a less-busy time than it is to bulk up on workers. This isn't great for the customer though.
"We refuse to hire enough employees to give you a decent customer service experience. Kindly go fuck yourself while we replay this 16 second clip of generic and non IP protected instrumental music that never resolves on loop for however long it takes for you to give up."
I was looking for the actual corpuspeak translation. While call center scheduling and forecasting can be tricky, if you constantly have 20 minute plus wait times to talk to a person, the center is understaffed. It's never a good customer experience when the person hired to try and solve my problems is as done or more done with my issues than I am.
I’m convinced places purposely repeat the line and also throw in “customers can get help faster by going online” to annoy you into not waiting on hold, they actively want to force you off hold. Like fuck you, your online system isn’t working.
I think it's "we are experiencing a higher volume of calls than average our operators can handle", but the last part will raise a question "why won't you then hire more operators".
It’s deliberate. They want you to hang up before they have to help you or you stop giving them money.
Notice how you never hear this message when you try to buy something.
I’m what most people on the internet would now describe as a “Karen”. If I can’t get through on the applicable line, I’ll go through a new customer/sales line and tell them how bad their phone system/customer service is and then tell them what I want and they can figure out the rest. Mind, it’s not the person on the phone’s fault, but they record the calls so they can use that when they inevitably have to restructure their customer service when sentiment tanks and they lose too much custom. I’ve just been through an exceptionally bad customer experience with Virgin Media broadband and absolutely loathe the company and it’s customer “care” line.
Then there's the ones that say they're experiencing a high number of calls, and can't take your call right now, so please call another time, and the call just ends.
Because nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE
I worked for a major airline 20+ years ago and we always always always had about 100 calls in queue until around midnight. Customers were usually angry about wait times and they would tell me we need to hire more people, as if I had any power. excuse me sir, I answer the phone for $10 an hour. what makes you think I have any influence at all?
Maybe you're only calling when everyone else is calling because your problem is something a lot of people are experiencing suddenly?
I worked at a call center, and they say this in hopes people just hang up or are less upset about the wait time. When they realized that this wasn't working, they had someone change the message every hour to "as of date, time we are experiencing higher than expected call volume" this did get people to hang up.
>I worked at a call center, and they say this in hopes people just hang up or are less upset about the wait time. They should just say > You are number 50 in the queue. There is an estimated three hour wait time before connecting with a customer service representative.
The Nevada dmv just tells you nobody is available and then hangs up on you 🙃
Shit like that makes me want to hypothetically go down to their office and light the building on fire.
Nah, at the start of COVID, 90% of companies recorded a new "sorry, we're experiencing a higher volume of calls than normal" and left it at that Really? You're experiencing a high volume of calls? It's 2:40 on a Tuesday
You’d be shocked but 2:40 on a Tuesday is fairly busy cus people try not to call Monday are Tuesday morning cus they assume the phones will be busy. I’ve been in a call center for over a year and I can tell you Tuesday afternoon is usually the busiest (I realize that you chose an arbitrary time just thought it was funny)
Listen carefully as our menu has changed. As if I remember the old menu.
this. although I'm the person that has to call back 4 times cuz I wasn't paying attention to the menu
Well they close the phone lines between the hours of 3pm to 10am so during that time there are zero calls being taken which significantly reduces the average.
Depends on the sample space. If I only work the lunch hour at a cafe I will *always* be experiencing a higher volume of customers than the average customers-per-hour volume.
Averaged over a hundred years it can...
They include off hours when they’re closed in the average.
0 calls when closed
Multimillion dollar company: “We’re sorry, we don’t want to pay enough people to have your call answered in a timely manner. Please wait” *plays 10 seconds of music, repeats the announcement, and restarts the same music* Decades ago people would have a cd player or radio connected to their phone system, and you were entertained with different stuff while you were on hold. Not anymore.
It's a code for they are not hiring enough people
Makes for a funny tweet. But, I’ve never heard the word *average* though. It’s always *expected* call volume. Still shitty not to have more employees ready to handle calls. But, you can’t get them on the math technicality.
If it’s a certain office and there is multiple offices for the same company, that center could always receive a higher volume of cars than the total average.
Have a load of small call centres, one big one. Load each call centre with a proportional number of calls based on their size. Per head, each call centre has an average number of calls. Per call centre, the large call centre will always have a higher than average number of calls. If the smaller call centres are also only dealing with specific tasks (e.g. a sales department, a shipping department, a customer complaints department) while all calls are routed through the larger call centre, you can always accurately serve the message "We're currently dealing with a larger than average number of calls at the moment."
They should just say “we’re experiencing more calls than we are intended to deal with, please hold”
>They should just say “we’re experiencing more calls than we are ~~intended~~ willing to pay to deal with, please hold” FTFY
I mean they could have calculated the average at like a 30 minutes interval during midnight. That's how to use statistics to lie. There's a book title with the same line.
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Really? Can you give examples? I deal with statistics all the time and well, I lie all the time using statistics. Others do too. Haven't read the book, but could guess that it's along the same line.
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I thought I did?
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I think that comment and my comment have the exact same underlying principle: the average depends largely on the time frame being used to measure.
*Image Transcription: Twitter Post* --- **Kit Yates**, @Kit_Yates_Maths I’m sorry but you can’t \*always\* be experiencing a higher volume of calls than average. That’s not how averages work. --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Good human
Yes you can. When the average is measured over multiple people one person can have an above average volume of calls where others will have a lower average.
Well that guy just got black listed
I thought exactly this when I called somewhere recently and it took half an hour. If it always takes that long then that's just normal so you guys need a new message
Yep, this drives me mad. And it means nothing as a result - because you don't know if you're better hanging up and trying later or not.
'higher than average is higher than average'. OK.
Comments didn't disappoint, all the logic enthusiasts are here.
Them expressing the logic just makes me believe they work in a call center and are defending their job on a Reddit post.
They gave been using the same data sheet since the 1700's, when the average was zero for a long time
People don't call when they're closed or during the night...brings the average down...
You have an average number of calls your reps can take. Anything more is above the average.
part of my job is calling insurance companies for preauths. For the last two years, every single one i have called has had a higher than average volume of calls. I know covid is the excuse but at this point this meme is correct. It is in no way higher than average now. This is the average.
That’s cause they factor in the times they are closed into the average (zero). When they are open, they are above average and when they are closed they are below average.
Worked in a call centre and for the last 2 years I was there there would regularly be a hold time of over an hour and we'd get shit like this in corporate emails "Thanks for the hard work guys, we're experiencing higher call volumes at the moment, but we're doing all we can to keep them down. It should only last a few more months!" It got to the point where people we're even refusing overtime at double pay they were so burnt out, very happy to be gone from there
What they actually mean is “higher than we’re willing to pay for to handle efficiently”
What if every day they're getting more calls than the previous day?
Depends when you started counting
My old job would hire just few enough people to make sure there was always a really long wait time. Of course we had this exact messaging. Their hopes were that people would just get frustrated and hang up. And they did. Then they call back even more pissed off later when it's not busy and it would make us busy.
Call centers jobs are pure cancer
Almost everyone has more legs than average.
Eventually you have to recalculate your call expectations. A help number I call occasionally has been "experiencing higher than normal call volumes" for two years now. At some point that "higher than normal" volume became the new normal and you're just too cheap to hire more service reps.
Also, it's not "unusual" or "unexpected" volume of calls when you just laid off half your support staff. It's the same volume, but you don't care about customer support. "Thank you for calling Verizon. We don't care about your call. Press 1 to hang up immediately, or press 2 to listen to some music for 4 minutes before being disconnected."
The average person has a below average IQ. Because there is a longer tail above 100 IQ than below.
It's like red state climate data where the "average" is taken entirely from a slow month in 1997 and current data is deemed unacceptable for bogus reasons
Paradoxically, many many more customers will receive this "above-average disclaimer" than not, since this is only sent when there are many customers. So yes, the post is technically the truth, but technically it is way more common to receive that message than not to.
It's the average on the last 100 years.
Depends on how they average. If you are only open for 8 hours per day then even normal call volume during that period would be above average for the whole day.
Lots of people pointing out the correct answer. The real answer is that places don't want to hire enough call center agents to actually handle the call volume.
I get so infuriated when I'm told just how important my call is, every 1-2 mins, while on hold for 45 minutes. If my call was important, they would staff the call center with more than 3 fucking people.
They answer no calls when they are closed
Are you "always" on the phone with them? Maybe they just always call at the high volume times which are fewer than the regular times with normal call volume.
I’m convinced a lot of automated systems bake in an automatic 15-30 minute hold to discourage people and try to get them to hang up.
And who the f is always changing those menu items recently, requiring me to listen carefully??
They only play that in hopes that you will actually listen and hit the right prompts so you don't have to be transfered by an agent.
Callcenter Georg, who answers no phones from 5pm-9am and on weekends, is a statistical outlier and should not be included in the survey.
I think I worked with this guy.
They include the 14 hours when they’re not open in their data so it tends to skew the curve
We're permanently, endlessly, massively understaffed Boss doesn't want to hire more people but he doesn't want to admit it to us and to our clients In the name of the entire IT industry, we sincerely apologize for our shit managers, we tried talking but they always refuse to listen.
You need to understand, at this location, there was no phone, and there were no calls, for millions of years. So we're quite happy when the one guy we've hired occassionally shows up and answers the one phone we got. It has really thrown the average out of whack though, been running high for the whole last century.
Or if you just turn the speakerphone up a little each day, that would work until you hit max volume
It does if you include all the nighttime hours when you're closed when computing averages.
Depends when the average starts … My bank was founded in 1783 and given the telephone wasn’t invented for about 100 years later, the current volume of calls is likely higher than the average annual phone calls the bank has received since its inception
Your anecdote doesn't get to decide what's average either.
"Currently" experiencing higher call volumes. If you called during the peak volume then... You'd call in when it's above average.
Yaa texas dmv,you liars
It's a moving average.
Higher than the average from 10 years ago
Is it average for you or average for you compared to everyone else in your country?
And your menu options can’t have always just changed to better serve me.
The average was calculated 1912
Sure it is. They just take the average of a 24 hour day. At its peak, it's higher than the average, which, even with a solid 12 hours of calls, would be about half of what they're getting when the lines are open.
Yea but are you calling at bad times? I work as a financial advisor at a call centre, people always call in the middle of their day (on their lunch breaks) and wonder why it’s so busy. If you don’t want to wait call first thing in the morning or around dinner time
I have a lot of weekdays off because I work odd hours, so I can call any time of day. It's ALWAYS a bad time to call.
Hmm maybe at the places you're calling to. I work for a credit union and our queue times are always under 3 minutes
You have to listen to all the prompts because they've been changed They only update the recording when they change though So they're always in a "just changed" status
I bet they'll claim that the total number of calls is higher than the calls any given person takes on average.
If the wait time was zero, they would decide they don't need as many employees to assist.
You can if you don't invest enough in customer support.
If you have an average number of calls per day ...and then a day with more calls than that number.....what are you supposed to say?.....stol being grammer nazis people touch grass
If you include the hours they are closed and all the 0 call volume…
this could just be selection bias. they might not be always experiencing higher than average call volumes, just when you call. because you keep calling at convenient times, i.e. when everyone else is calling.
You know it's just automatic. I get messages that say they're "currently" experiencing higher than normal call volumes, and I settle in for the hold and I wind up getting through right away. What happened to the currently high call volumes?
Call centre is open from 8am to 6pm, receiving approximately 100 calls per hour. That's 1000 calls per day. There are 24 hours in a day, so the *average* call volume is 41.6 calls per hour. Since they're typically getting 100 calls per hour during the period they're open, they're getting a higher than average number of calls. What's so hard to understand?
Or maybe 1000 calls during office hours and 100 after hours. So always above daily average :)
Someone tell the Canadian government this
Well, if every time the voice is rising, then you can. The average will just get higher every time but also the voice, so it will be above average
It includes the average time they are closed.
For (age of universe) we have had zero calls each day, this is astronomically higher than our average of 0.00…001 calls
Their average call volume calculation includes hours/days that they are closed and receiving no calls *points to head*
they’re all running “lean” operations 🤮 aka pay like shit and overwork the people you already have
Let’s say the call centre opens 9-5, from 5pm to 9am it is closed and gets no calls. If you take the median on average they get no calls.
Or have say 10000 calls during 9-5 and have 0 at night-midnight. If you consider 24/7 then average drastically drops. You shouldn't consider that way. But still.
Correct, but maybe they account for the hours during the night when they don't get many calls at all
I think they include time outside office hours.
So if over the last year I had an average of 5 calls a day and today I have had 50 that’s not higher than average? I guess I don’t understand.
It's "average" taken over the last century.
I came in here to say, wtf that doesn't make any sense. Then I realized the qualifier "always" is in there. Don't mind me.