Read here: all utilities and banks in America. Oh you want to call and talk about something important regarding your natural gas bill or mortgage? Call between 10am and 4pm Monday-Friday to talk to one of our dedicated Sri Lankan representatives. Oh you work during that time? Good, that’s the point lol
If they include call volume data back to the Neolithic period in their calculations, then yes, call volumes are higher than average (the average being 0.001 calls per century, rounding up).
It’s even simpler. A strictly increasing series will always have element n be higher than the average between any element<n and element n.
Or in other words, if the number of calls is increasing every day, it will always be above average no matter the window used. If you use slightly larger windows you can even have some local decreases and have it still be true, as long as the overall trend is increasing (which you’ve demonstrated the extreme case of).
Yeah it’s fun seeing people figuring out which loophole companies use. Is it really anything other than they save a tiny bit of money by not giving a shit about your experience.
Eh, nothing I did was “figuring out which loophole [they] use”. I’d think most people in this thread talking about the mathematics that could make it a true statement are fully aware that the companies are not using any loophole and just say “above average” to save face. It’s simply a nice brain teaser to some people (myself included) to figure out under which circumstances the statement could be always true.
Also if you wanna be really pedantic, the math is not about the companies, but a debunking of the original Tweet which confidently yet incorrectly says that this statement couldn’t be always true.
The nomenclature I always hear is, “Experiencing a higher than expected call volume,” and since no one can prove how low their expectations actually are there is no crack in which to insert the prybar of legal complaint.
The average is for a good, functioning call center. Their understaffed shitshow is experiencing more calls in relation to amount of staff than they are prepared to.
It’s still better to hear this lying message and then be kicked off than when they have you talk to the robot that tries to understand what you want but can’t and then ends up telling you what movies are playing right now in Singapore for some reason.
Yeah, it’s fake lol. I mean maybe for some businesses it isn’t fake, but usually clients would ask us to make it where “if there’s more than X calls in queue, play the message”. Turns out, there’s always more than X calls in queue. It’s not actually looking at the average.
It’s kinda weird, some things are just always like that, some things clients want to add in because the average user expects it.
Someone wanted a repeat caller to get bumped to the front of the queue. Literally encouraging the “if I hang up and call back I’ll get there sooner” people. Awful.
Stop putting people on hold, period. We have the technology to just call back when they’re at or near the top of the queue. If they miss their call, maybe their number gets priority for an hour or something. Either way, when I get put on hold, I mostly fantasize about murdering whoever set up that system.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.
I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.
She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you
I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!
Yeah, it’s a feature dubbed “queued callback”. Saves your place, it’s a pretty common request. Customers like Delta, Intuit, Pacific Life, Citibank, Dyson, all use the platform I build (Amazon Connect) and do stuff like that.
Problem is, no one answers a call from an unknown number these days. Some phones are getting smart enough to recognize the number and show that it’s a business, though that’s more anecdotal evidence from my personal device (Pixel Fold with Google Fi carrier).
As someone who is also a phone system admin, if you had an older system, that feature was a pretty expensive feature to add on. We never purchased it because to buy what was needed to do it would’ve costed a ton. We did recently switch to a cloud pbx a few months ago and the one advantage I’ve seen is most of the high end features seem to be more readily available and cheaper when bundled with their packages so we finally got a lot of these options. RIP are the days of on prem systems.
I guess my point is I would imagine a lot of places still use older systems possibly and will wait as long as possible before upgrading and probably do not have the call back feature.
That’s a good point, a lot of people are still on old Avaya or Cisco systems and it was expensive to do that. A lot of cloud providers now don’t charge anything for it.
Yup, we were Avaya. Once Covid started, we looked into finally getting WFM and other features like this because we were a place that directly increased call volume due to covid but were unable to keep up with the amount of concurrent calls. We wanted to use the call back feature to help the agents who were overwhelmed and wouldn’t be able to get a large increase in help anytime soon. Especially since we knew these levels would only be temporary as well. In the end, it was not approved.
So the length of the queue is the expected average, right? Then, if you fall off that you are therefore the above average call in the message… except the length of the queue probably doesn’t actually much to do with any kind of average of the number of calls.
You can always be getting a result above average in a series of numbers as long as the nth number is significantly greater than the previous ones. For example, f(x) = x^2 would always be above average for every next number
Sure you can. If the average is over 24 hours, then any time the phone line is open they’re getting higher than the average number of calls. X2 if you include weekends and holidays.
“Your call is very important to us… but not so important that we would actually do anything about it like hiring more representatives. This message will repeat every 5 minutes until you get frustrated and hang up.”
Ugh I still have an air conditioner that was dead out of the box (bought it off season so didn’t use it till summer…summer 2020)
Tried a bunch of times to call in but “due to the pandemic” (what a fucking catchall for anti-consumer behavior…if a huge company hadn’t figured out how to keep their call center staffed 5 months into it, then it’s clearly intentional), nobody ever answered the call in the hour or so I’d wait on hold, several times.
yeah, but they would be better able to put an rma through for you. it is kind of on them to guarantee a working product actually. if the manufacturer gave them a faulty product it’s up to them to get the manufacturer to fix it. most retailers have an entire system and process for this kind of stuff. things show up to retailers broken all the time. part of their job is to guarantee against that and deal with it if they fail to before you buy it. if you asked them to replace it with a like model that worked or for them to initiate an rma and they refused then you’d be in the right to issue a chargesback.
I know we all had to be way more patient and lenient during the pandemic, but I would say that it’s way more the store’s responsibility than yours for a defective product, and they should take responsibility for the consequences of doing business with manufacturers who have no customer support.
Retailers are allowed to disclaim the merchantability and fitness for any particular purpose of the items they sell and most do. The customer is free to refuse, of course, via the simple expedient of going away and buying it somewhere else.
This is partially a blame-shifting exercise to reduce costs, yes, but it’s also a shield against the ceaseless horde of dipshits we have in this country who will willfully misuse a product and then immediately try to sue the retailer they bought it from when it doesn’t work or they hurt themselves with it via their own stupidity. It is much easier from a legal perspective to make a blanket “we don’t imply this product is applicable for any purpose” statement vs. having to explicitly predict whatever cockamamie thing someone might try it on and have to say “no, moron, that chainsaw is not suitable for cutting bricks,” etc.
Read all that fine print on the back of your receipt some day. You will be enlightened and, most likely, also infuriated.
Huh I didn’t realise that. I’m Australian but have been living in the USA for around 11 years.
Australia’s consumer laws are far stricter than the USA. In Australia, the store is responsible for fitness and quality of a product, based not just on its advertising but also what sales reps in the store say to you.
Obviously you can’t return something nor ask for a repair/replacement if you’re using it for something other than its intended purpose (like using a chainsaw on bricks or whatever), but otherwise, the law is in your favour as a consumer.
Stores must also accept warranty returns and not say that you need to go to the manufacturer. It’s not legal to say “no refunds”.
Products must last at least as long as a reasonable consumer thinks they should last. For example, a fridge would have to be repaired or replaced under warranty if it stops working after 4 years, even if the warranty is only 1 year, as most people would reasonably expect a fridge to last more than 4 years.
It means some stuff costs more, but it’s absolutely worth it for the protection you get.
It doesn’t help that a lot of companies outsource their call centers to third party vendors who only care about keeping the contract and not about the main company’s customers.
That’s what it’s all about, saving on overhead and the percentage of people who give up. Its not just corporations to, ever sign up for any public assistance? You WILL be denied to see if you will give up.
Maybe I will give up when the draft happens. The 1% can defend its own country, it’s clearly not ours.
If everyone you measure the number of calls you get is higher than the previous measurement then it is easily possible. Y’know day 1 you get one phone call, day 2 two, etc. Than you will consistently have higher volume than average… Technically
The odds of ever needing to call customer service for a product or service weigh heavily in my decision to buy it.
And every support line needs a “direct to tier 2 support” option. I don’t care if every caller chooses it. If I wanted tier 1 support I would be on the website.
In my company I directly escalate all issues no matter how small. They had to ask me to stop that after I escalated an issue due to an unplugged power cord.
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