Thanks for that!
> some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls.
Yeah, that sounds familiar. And the worst part is, as call centers get paid for call volume (and quality, but measuring quality except by the most shallow and misguided metrics would cost money to employ additional real people so it's avoided), it's kind of in their best interest to just have customers call over and over again. I always wondered about the kind of mutually parasitic relationship between call centers and companies that outsource to them, maybe that's really the whole problem, maybe it should be done in-house, period. If you have a big house and that makes it hard, boo-hoo. Make a smaller house, or learn to hack hard things.
> Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though – for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn’t instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.
I used to fantasize about this. First off, you can't turn off caller ID for this, but that's fair I think. So you call the hotline, it tells you in what place in the queue you are, and that you can either hold the line or get called back when you are very close to being the next in line. You can call anytime to have an update on your queue position and wait, and if you miss the call (since it would be automatic and there would be no person waiting on the other end just yet, no harm in letting it ring for as long as possible), you're back to square one. Why isn't it already done this or a similar way? Surely such systems exist, even if not (yet) widely used?
Why not allow pressing numbers to change the music as you wait? And last, but not least: how hard is it to loop something properly? (I swear, some of that has to be on purpose, sadism is a better fitting explanation than incompetence.)
> Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.
Well, they really really want you to use the website. For a lot of "they"'s. Not that they can manage to run that well, either, but it's still cheaper and "scales better". I agree it's stupid, I detested it not because of job security but because I hated the lame website and how pointless it was to try to make any suggestions "above my pay grade", but in their mind, there is a point, it's not just filler.
http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/politics-of-call...
> But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it’s a cost-centre, there’s no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.
Yes. I was lucky in that I found a way to not reduce my status, but actually learn a lot about myself and people, but that's generally the pattern I saw.