It’s a higher average than the amount of calls they had 150 years ago.
So look, guys, it’s reaaaally easy:
If it isn’t mandated, regulated, and enforced by law, assume the corporation is lying.
Bonus Wisdom Save: If a corp says you should do something, strongly consider doing the opposite.
If it isn’t mandated, regulated, and enforced by law
and even then, dont be so sure…
…sorry we’re continuously experiencing higher number of calls than what is average for other companies.
actually, it is. let me explain.
Let’s simplify and say that there are peak hours and low hours. 100 people call during a peak hour, and 25 during a low hour. The chance of calling during a peak hour is 80%, since you are four times as likely to be one of the 100 rather than one of the 25.
The same effect means that you are almost always on planes and trains that are very full, even though every now and then they ride almost empty. Fewer people get to experience empty train rides by definition.
Of course this effect falls apart when your usage patterns differ from everybody else’s. If everybody takes the train at rush hour, you might ride an empty one at noon. Or, if you call the hotline while everybody else is sleeping, you might have a better chance.
But yeah companies also just lie to make themselves look better lol
Yes, this is exactly it. You are calling when other people are calling. You are the congestion.
If you call before 11 AM you will have a much better time, as will the customer service operators.
Nah, they’re overloaded at that time too
Obviously. Because that’s the time all the people who want to avoid the congestion call.
You sound like a guy who knows which part of a warplane to reinforce.
Soo you’re saying we should increase train frequency for times when they’re empty?
If that frequency is once an hour compared to once in five minutes, then yes. If frequency is too low, then people are more likely to use alternative transport or not go at all.
The same goes for traffic. If you are experiencing traffic, you ARE traffic.
This is why PT is OP. The bigger traffic is - the smaller intervals are.
I’d imagine they include their off-hours in the ‘averages’.
“So crazy that we’re getting more calls when we’re open than when we’re closed!”
^probably this.
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.
Technically true If they close the phone line at night.
If “your call is important to them” they would hire enough people to answer the phone.
I am experiencing a lower IQ than average. Does that equate? motherfucker ?
Yeah but it sounds a lot better than “We’ve pursued a policy of understaffing go save costs”.
It depends on their window.
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).
Pretty sure that’s how they do the math.
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).
It’s even simpler. They just lie about and always say it’s higher than average.
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.
Or just let’s assume the phones are open 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. The average call volume would be drastically lower than during business hours
They’d just need to include the call volume for when they’re closed. Open 9-5 but take the average over a whole 24 hour day.
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.
Actually you can. If you get 10 calls a day and then only 1 day 9 calls the average is a little less than 10, which means most of the time you do experience more than average.
He didn’t say “most of the time” though. He said “always.”
“….so please hold onto that phone with your technically above average number of hands and we’ll help you soon.”
I sell and build call centers for a living.
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.
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.
Hold for me and call screening on the pixel is amazing. It’s so much better than any other feature available on any other phone.
Take a number. Call back. Simple.
And then they start playing horrible, distorted wait music.
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!
Also: “Please listen closely as our menus have recently changed.”
because I call the customer service line of any one company so much, that I have memorized their touch tone menu
9 months into my daily call to Maytag: Excuse me, babe. I have to walk into the other room so I can listen. Apparently, they’ve changed their phone menu.
I had so many issues with Scottish Power that I pretty much did. Fucking useless company.
