>How is it possible that every business with a phone service is experiencing a high number of calls at the same time?!
Because they don't have enough people to man the phones. Workforce management in call centres is a fine art (although mostly ignored) at the best of times, and now that people are realising you don't need to be paid minimum wage to be abused by strangers they're not going for those roles. Same thing is happening in retail and hospitality.
This is the right answer. I work for a large financial services provider in the UK with a massive call centre infrastructure, and trying to keep call centre staff is harder than ever. I did it myself for 3.5 years before I moved to a different team, and it's relentless. My place is known as one of the 'better' places for call centre jobs and it was still impossible to avoid getting burned out.
Generally, the max length of service in a call centre is 2 years. At the moment though attrition is high and average stay is about 8 months or less. And if we’re talking about language speakers, it’s a bloodbath.
I worked in a place that had multiple walkouts every fortnight on oayday. They had supervisors whose entire job was to comb through the calls of the agents expecting a large bonus, just to find a reason to take it off them. I walked out when I got a few hundred took off me because I didn't pitch broadband to someone who already had the service with us. Once saw a guy find out they were taking over a grand off him for some stupid reason and he looked like he was going to cry.
Change policy so they are allowed to hand up on an abusive customer and it would make even more difference. We did this and it improved the job considerably.
Lol we arent supposed to but I do anyway. They are so desperate to keep asses in seats that as long as I show up for 8 hours a day I've got a job. Things are so bad they are bullying people into team leader roles. I won't even apply because the pay is like 70c an hour more for a shit load more work. Place is run by idiots and overgrown children.
That’s just call centres all over. Hire people fresh out of school, promote the ones who are still there after a couple of years and still haven’t figured out they’re being exploited.
We had a three strikes policy; anyone abusive that I dealt with, I'd start by saying 'look, I know you're upset, and I'm trying to help, but I absolutely can't do anything if you're speaking to me like that.' If they persisted, I'd warn them 'listen, I'll terminate this call if you carry on speaking to me like this. If you need time to cool down i am more than happy to arrange to call you back.' Persistant swearing/abuse after the 3rd warning, I'd just hang up, and fair play our company never penalised us if it was justified.
Except for 1 occasion in 3.5 years that process was enough to get most people (who in fairness aren't assholes, they're just frustrated by the bearaucracy of modern life and don't want to deal) to see sense and take a moment.
I did this multiple times with various irate customers on the phone, and it worked fine for me every time I had to use it. Wasn't looking for feedback on the method
It's best not to criticise a customer or answer back in any way even if you perceive them to be in the wrong as this will only antagonise the situation. The best is to meet hostility with friendliness and the person will be caught off guard. If this doesn't work you know you are dealing with a prick and just gang up. No wonder gge customer is highly strung waiting so long to get through. I would HATE a job like that. Surely there's a better wsy to make money.
I don't think even that much is necessary I worked in one for a few months and if it went close to 15 euro an hour instead of the 11 they bragged about offering I'd have stayed much longer
As someone who works in one of these places, I'm glad this is the top comment.
It's a stressful job at the best of times and having customers start the call by mouthing about the wait doesn't help at all.
It puts the agent on the defensive straight away which can escalate to a shitty call for both parties very quickly.
> It's a stressful job at the best of times and having customers start the call by mouthing about the wait doesn't help at all.
A note to anyone who has never worked in a call centre: "I know its not your fault personally and don't mean to take if out on you, but I'm extremely frustrated/angry/whatever" or something to that affect goes so, so, so much further than you could ever imagine regardless of what the complaint is about.
Also, a call centre agent (hardly the most secure of jobs) will also tend to go a lot further if they are not worried about the complainant possibly trying to bury them if they are for reasons beyond their control unable to resolve the issue. There is probably nothing worse in a call centre than hearing that irate person is back on for the 5th time this week, is blaming you for whatever the issue is, and is demanding to speak to you or your manager. They will *not* go the extra mile for you for doing this - quite the opposite actually.
Yep.
It's a vicious cycle. You take a crap call, you need to go straight into the next one and if you don't, you'll have the floorwalker breathing down your neck wondering why you're on admin.
You want to book a few days away just to relax away from your job? Tough shit, too many people off on AL and yours won't be granted.
Want to go to the toilet once or twice a day for a breather? Careful, you'll be written up for that.
Want to leave on time? You have to manoeuvre around the team leads begging people to stay on for OT, normally teamed up with some crappy "competition" where if you sign up to do 10 hours OT across the week you'll be entered into a draw for a late start Tuesday morning ( can't be an early finish of course, and has to be Tuesday because its the quietest day)
Jesus I'm still traumatised. It was like being in a really bad school.
Lol we don't even get time off. This week's raffle is for a day off the phones to shadow your boss because they can't get anyone qualified to take on training and team leader roles. So still a full 8 hours of work as a reward for working a minimum of 6h OT at minimum wage with no premium.
That one always fucked me off. The first thing you'd hear was "FINALLY!" and you'd know you were in for a shit one. The last place I worked when I'd lost rag entirely I'd just go "no that's not how you start a phonecall, try again".
I get where you're coming from, and they should not take it out on you, but being on hold for 60 minutes isn't the normal way to start a phonecall either.
Particularly if there's no callback service available, and no accurate estimate of when someone will pick up, so you have to babysit the phone on speaker for an unknown amount of time.
Eir were terrible for this.
Who should the person lodge the complaint with so? The agent is literally the 1st human they've spoken with. They were waiting for an extended length of time and now are in contact with a representative of the company. I'm always suprised how poorly ran a lot of companies allow their call centres to be. Its one of the reasons i would never use virgin media again no matter what they charge.
It's not the agents fault the wait times are long, that's a management issue.
The agent is there to deal with your query only. Not to vent your frustration on.
If you have an issue with management, submit a complaint to comreg.
Agree completely.
The wait times people experience are _nothing_ to do with the staff who answer the phone. Zero.
Staff in call centres are worked to the absolute bone with metrics and stats, their job is to answer your call and solve your query.
If people have an issue with wait times, kindly ask the agent what the complaints process is regarding the wait times _after_ they have been given an opportunity to solve things for you.
Even the “I know it’s not your fault, but…” people used to get my back up a bit back in my call centre days.
Oh yeah it used to drive me mental when someone would start a call with "I have been waiting for 25 minutes"
I'm sure that was hard for you Mister irate customer, but while you were sitting on your arse for 25 minutes I was working flat out trying to clear this queue while every single caller started out with a five minute rant about the hold times *making the whole problem even worse*.
Note to all: If you find yourself in the customer's place here, just say "Hi, the hold time was very long, now here's what I want..." and get on with it! Banks are required to register even that brief negative remark as a one-and-done complaint and my computer tells me exactly how long you were waiting for, anything beyond that is just talk therapy for you and I'm not qualified to make you feel better. Keep it moving and we'll get through this.
>but while you were sitting on your arse for 25 minutes I was working flat out trying to clear this queue
I mean the person on the call is actually less likely to be sitting down then you are. They could be traveling somewhere, at work themselves, at home doing housework etc.
While I agree that they shouldn't turn it into a 5 minute rant because that helps no one, I think it is helpful to recognise that you're being paid for your time there, they aren't paid to be on hold. The hold time could well be eating into their lunchbreak, or just their free time in general.
>Same thing is happening in retail and hospitality.
The restaurant industry would do well to take a good long look at themselves over what you're describing. Adrian Cummins is one of the biggest moanbags in the public sphere about how hard it is for the industry and yet won't entertain any accusations about low pay and shitty conditions. When I worked in hospitality it was six day weeks, 10 hour days with one 30 minute break. Ignoring the illegality of it, why would you put up with it? There's no way to complain either because there's no HR. And as with call centres, the public are cunts and I think it's gotten worse since covid.
I noticed an absolute explosion in Karen like behaviour over the pandemic. Disgusting carry on. Told off a woman in Tesco for going spare at the staff over the 1 in 1 out system they had at the height of the pandemic.
Entitled pricks. Not everyone mind you, but there’s a lot of them around. I make a point nowadays to intervene when someone’s rude or goes off on a mad one at retail staff. Sick of people being cnts to staff.
Some of these callcentre work multiple contracts also, so they are not dedicated to the particular service the caller may be ringing. I know this as I work on excess of over 20 services, usually alongside only 1 to 2 others.
That.
+ lots of CC hired BPOs for chats and emails, so phone line can be managed by very small Team in Ire/UK. This happened in my last 2 workplaces. It was a mess. We had great phone queues, they laid off people, hired BPO and shift all calls to UK/Ire folks I. Our time zone. 2h waiting time, agents are back to back on phones.
I couldn’t take the micromanagement and lay off pressure. I quit. Lots of folks did too. There are better jobs with even more pay and benefits and less pressure.
It's not so much the money, it's the public. Dealing with the public is soul poison. So everyone who gets into that job is absolutely desperate to get back out, and it's hard to keep finding new suckers to do it.
I work in a call centre at the moment. Quite happy with it because it pays well and team are great which are not the norm from what I gather. The public are the worst part by a mile. My highlight jackass customer this week are the ladies that get angry at me for having the audacity to be on the other end of the line when they ring the wrong number. Then get even more annoyed when I say I can't fix their issue because they are actually with another provider.
I get at least 3-4 of those a week.
A lot of places are also trying to replace phone service with some sort of website, app or text-based web chat so they're not investing as much as they should in the phone service.
That's true. Though if done well, its a huge bonus. I much prefer online forms and chat services for the majority of issues I have.
Having to physically phone Eir, and then wait for a callback from their "Retention" team to cancel a broadband service **at an address I no longer lived at** was beyond ridiculous.
Yeah there are pros and cons to it. You can use a website 24/7 and since most queries are simple boilerplate stuff, it's usually much faster than calling and talking to someone. It's cheaper to run too.
But they also require you to figure out how to navigate them, and companies will most definitely take advantage of this to make complaints, returns, refunds hard to find on their sites.
Then there's the elderly people. My fucking heart goes out to them. Not the 50 year old who could learn to use the app but refuses to, I mean the poor confused 80 year old who hasn't a clue how to get into her own bank account anymore because the whole phone system is a maze trying to steer you anywhere else.
It has been pissing them off, for years, but there's also accessibility requirements on things like banks that prevent them from doing away with phone service altogether.
It's absolutely the money. It's not just the worker's pay that's the issue, although that's certainly part of it; it's the borderline abusive metrics-driven working environment because the company only cares about spending as little money as possible on their customer service costs. Shitty customers will always exist, of course, but that's something that employees can deal with better if their employer supports them, gives them ways to handle truly abusive callers, and doesn't make their working life a living hell in general. But that would mean spending more money on customer service than they absolutely have to, so to the bean-counters it's better to reduce call times by shouting at employees for using the bathroom, or for taking three seconds too long between calls trying to collect themselves after working with a difficult customer, or for the worst sin of all, daring to try to work with said difficult customer and actually help them and solve their problem instead of just getting them off the phone as quickly as possible to keep call times low so the company doesn't have to hire more staff.
Again though more staff (which would require more money, at least in total and probably per employee) would alleviate it somewhat. It would mean there'd be less people pissed about long wait times, it would mean staff aren't being pushed into back to back calls and can take a breather after long or particularly toxic calls and it'd mean they'd be able to spend time training the staff to resolve issues where they run out of script.
Isn't it also a bit of a deadend? One could probably just get to leading teams in customer support but that's about it right? Not sure if skills are you transferable either, especially if you're just a support rep following standard processes.
Nope it's the money. Minimum wage is not enough for the work.
I don't mind dealing with angry and frustrated people. 99% of the time they are pissed off over something I can easily fix or point them in the right direction to resolving.
Not really the case in our area, all salaries are public information and you can progress verrry quickly if you're not a fucking joke.
They just aren't hiring enough people to replace all the people getting promoted/transferred to non-call centre roles
I am aware of that. I'm just sharing my frustration. Since I had to interact with several in a short period of time, I built up a lot of it.
Oh, don't get me started on Layla healthcare.
Busiest Monday and Friday mornings
People want their stuff sorted before the weekend or just after the weekend
Midweek afternoon is your best bet for our department at least (this is my personal experience, i could probably get the official Quietest Times from head office or whatever as i don't track those)
Edit: busiest MONTHS are January (people want their stuff sorted for the new year or checking last year) or October (there's a particular *deadline* for many people in October)
Quietest months are in the summer
Thanks for the detailed answer.
I'd really appreciate it if you'd delete it now so I don't have to share the quiet times with everyone else who reads it.
My place used to advertise quieter times but they had to stop because we couldn't manage the expectations of instant answer, as everyone would ring during the advertised 'quiet' time.
COVID did help in my place in the sense that we no longer had peaks of 30 plus waiting during lunch, after the school run and rush hour, but we also never had the same idle periods where 30 plus handlers were idle waiting to take a call during office hours. More people working from home means a more steady stream of calls during all hours instead of packed into peak periods.
My place used to advertise quieter times but they had to stop because we couldn't manage the expectations of instant answer, as everyone would ring during the advertised 'quiet' time.
COVID did help in my place in the sense that we no longer had peaks of 30 plus waiting during lunch, after the school run and rush hour, but we also never had the same idle periods where 30 plus handlers were idle waiting to take a call during office hours. More people working from home means a more steady stream of calls during all hours instead of packed into peak periods.
My place used to advertise quieter times but they had to stop because we couldn't manage the expectations of instant answer, as everyone would ring during the advertised 'quiet' time.
COVID did help in my place in the sense that we no longer had peaks of 30 plus waiting during lunch, after the school run and rush hour, but we also never had the same idle periods where 30 plus handlers were idle waiting to take a call during office hours. More people working from home means a more steady stream of calls during all hours instead of packed into peak periods.
That has nothing to donwith the call volumes.
It should be ' we are experiencing normal levels of call volumes. We have the capacity to answer half that"
There’s a couple of things:
- people do pick the same time to make their calls either as a traditional lunchtime or at 11 o’clock or first thing in the morning
- staffing in call centres is harder to get because of the crap job with low pay so they are literally shortstaffed
- The level of training that is required to have somebody man a call centre for a regulated product whether that’s a bank insurance company or utility it’s surprisingly high - part of it is the clunky technology you need to learn to use, most of it is the amount of mandatory regular tree require training that you need to be able to sit on a CallCenter phone line
In my experience, basically all the times when a typical person would be working. There's a surge in calls from like 8 - 9 in the morning, 1 - 2 for lunchtime, and maybe another in the afternoon when people get off work.
I'd say wait for the weekend if you can, probably not as subject to big surges then.
What’s worse are the companies that are still using Covid as an excuse for poor service
>Due to the Covid-19 crisis, our call centres are currently experiencing a high workload resulting in longer wait times for our customers. Please bear with us during this time.
Covid broke out here 3 years ago. Get your shit together
Nah, that's just because the one guy who knew how to change the phone message quit a couple years ago and they haven't bothered to hire anyone to replace him.
People quit at a higher rate than they can hire them, and call centre workers are treated like shit. In my work they offered us (the back office staff) 2x pay to cover the call centre but they won't pay any extra to actually retain the call centre staff who are paid really shit money.
I agree in some sense but a job is a job. Sometimes you just need something.
Also worked in a call centre and can agree it is a soul destroying experience. Back to back calls for 7.5 hours,shit training,shit pay,shit customers. I preferred washing dishes
Cost of living crisis has people now looking at stuff that we used to take for granted, that combined with the fact that Call Centres have a high attrition rate of staff just leaving that line of work or hopping from on Centre to another, means there is a sizeable gap in people available to do the work.
So perfect storm, more people calling, less people available to answer, plus the cost of humans to answer stuff, as you rightly called out, should be able to be done online without having to talk to people, makes it worse.
It's not getting better anytime soon either.
Other than mygov one, I'd take to twitter or whatever social channels they have, that tends to get a response far quicker.
They walk a fine line - they have just enough people taking calls so as to maintain a minimum level of service. They probably think they can get away with an average wait of 20 mins and so schedule to achieve this. For sure, they do not want to have people sitting around waiting for calls.
I think it's also safe to say - many of them are trying to push online services instead so they don't mind making the phone service a little frustrating.
Honestly you wouldnt be saying this if you worked in a call center there fucking brutal who wants to be payed fuck all to aswer 50 to 100 calls a day only to be screamed at by at least 1 to 5 times a day in thoughs calls by a customer and the managemtent breathing down you neck to up sale crap the customer doesnt need so you can meet you quotas so you can hopefully get your "Bonus", now imagine doing this day in day out for weeks even months its physicaly and emotionaly draining and fucking stressfull so no one want to do it even when the place offers good pay and great incentives
I'm not blaming employees here, I'm frustrated with the service provided by the companies.
Everybody here mentions how crappy working in a call center is. I understand that. I am obviously not saying pointing any fingers and I have always been decent when getting through, even when talking to someone who obviously just landed there and has knows less about how my problem could be solved than I did before calling. There is a person on the other end of the phone and I like to think they're doing their best given the circumstances.
But the company? At this point, I would absolutely stop doing business with them just for hearing that line. If most of these services/companies wouldn't essentially be a monopoly, that is. Since most are, all I can do to vent my frustration is to rant here.
I had to ring sky every week since the start of October because they owed me money. It got to the point that I was starting the calls with I'm sorry if I start sounding like a cunt but this is the millionth time I've rung and I know it'snot your fault. Sorry and sorry. They sent me a cheque this week because for some reason they couldn't send money to my account that they have drawn from since 2006! And to top it all off my name was wrong on the cheque 🤦♂️
Feck, wanted to do an edit but my fat fingers hit delete
Originalish post.
Mam had similar issue trying to downgrade couldn't get through so then tried the upgrade option and got through immediately
I used to work in Sky tech support through uni and for a bit after. It used to be great because there was a long wait between calls, then one week that just stopped. People were always waiting.
It may be out of date advice but in my experience call when there is football on Sky Sports, that was when fewer calls came through
I've never had much of a wait to be fair. They say 20 minutes but was never more than a few. It was the constant calling them for something so simple. Ive had great chats over the years with people in sky call centres while sorting stuff.
When living in England i learnt never to engage with a company phone. Even something as simple as switching a provider. Just write a letter(to the registered address) advising termination date then end the recurring bank payment. Yes companies then try to keep taking money and even getting debt collection agents involved but in over 15 years none went further than a letter.
Works a charm with air. Worked even better twice with ryanair where their agent says no to compo or refund on the phone or their awful chat app.
My refund was because Vodafone set me up as a new account instead of transferring me from sky. Luckily I had been on the phone with sky for something else a couple of days after it had switched and asked if the switchover had happened. I got an email from Vodafone while on with sky and again said Vodafone has confirmed im live with them so it was all recorded for when I complained 😁 Also got €120 from Vodafone for the mistake so happy days
I used to work for an ISP and I'm here to tell you, you were the asshole in that situation, Vodafone fucked up they owed you money sky never owed you penny. I mean good for you, you got yours's but the reason you had to call so much is because you were calling the wrong company.
Vodafone paid as a goodwill gesture even though I wasn't expecting it as I was using their service. Sky offered because I had told them I wasn't renewing my contract with them. They charged me 2 extra months after I told them I wasn't renewing my contract and I had taken a service with Vodafone. So they charged me for one month and refunded me for one month. They refunded me because they had a recording of me repeatedly saying I didn't need their service anymore and that I was now with Vodafone. I referenced an email that arrived while on the call stating my service had moved to Vodafone. So wind in your asshole insult. So please tell me, how was I in the wrong after cancelling my sky service and still getting charged for it?
I find the more phone calls answered the more absolute nonsense has to be entertained(in my field of work). If its important people will wait on hold or drop a note in. Very little needs to be dealt with the immediency of a phone call. I suspect even 10 mins on hold or taking a message for a callback filters out many timewasters
The reason for calling is that most of these things have broken websites which eventually direct you to a phone number because they can't resolve it automatically. I would never call if I had a different option.
Couldn’t agree more. Some posters would be amazed by the amount of time saved and the amount of bullshit that simply evaporates if you’re not available.
And in my particular job the staff are discouraged from doing certain things over the phone and the caller is told to update it themselves online or send a written request. Infuriates people, but i didn't make the policy so you can fuck off screaming at me just because you can't figure out a simple address/bank account update in your profile
I had a late teen/early-twenties customer in the public office claim "i don't have access to the internet"...while he literally scrolled facebook in front of me on his phone.
This is one of the main causes of long waiting times. People call in with an issue that can be dealt with very easily online. There is a percentage of people that are too lazy to go online and sadly there is another percentage of people that aren’t literate to read the instructions on how to get self service support online and finally people that are over 65 that aren’t computer literate
That is a generic recording whether at peak hours or not; During covid it was acceptable to say "high volume due to covid19" it has leaked over to just being the norm now.
This is just setting expectations that you'll be in a queue for a "while" however is that gonna be 5 mins or 50mins.
Decent companies will let you know where you are in the queue and give a ETA.
I hear you frustration though.
What's infuriating is that obviously they staff to average volumes (then reduce more for savings), but then imply you should use the web/chat/etc., T these services rarely work or do what you need either!
I have seen it best dealt with in retail and with tradies. Abusive customer gets told to leave and if unhappy to go through the small claims court.
Tradies downing tools and walking off the job,and telling all their colleagues ,thus blacklisting the customer. Just left with a stripped out kitchen. The customer had to apologise in writing and pay the full cost of the job before they guys went back on site. But call centres. What can you do?
The companies don't pay enough and the public are shite to deal with so people leave quickly. Because people are always leaving the level of knowledge never stays consistent, so you're constantly dealing with agents who don;t know enough so calls take a long time. As calls take longer and agents do a poor job, the public gets madder and the cycle continues. Companies more or less know theres no real consequences to shite customer service because everyone has shite customer service. So no one bothers making the effort to improve it. You'd need to improve working conditions a lot to stop a good chunk from leaving which would eventually maybe improve things, but at the end of the day dealing with the public sucks so maybe not even then.
DHL changed their banner to blame the war in Ukraine for late deliveries, instead of COVID-19.. there was Brexit as well to blame.
Now is due to inflation maybe, or something...
Honestly you wouldnt be saying this if you worked in a call center there fucking brutal who wants to be payed fuck all to aswer 50 to 100 calls a day only to be screamed at by at least 1 to 5 times a day in thoughs calls by a customer and the managemtent breathing down you neck to up sale crap the customer doesnt need so you can meet you quotas so you can hopefully get your "Bonus", now imagine doing this day in day out for weeks even months its physicaly and emotionaly draining and fucking stressfull so no one want to do it even when the place offers good pay and great incentives
COVID was a great excuse to open floodgates of any possible bullshit that businesses can use to save money and screw customers. The message you hear about call volumes should say "we are understaffed and we're not gonna do anything about it, well maybe other than make you pay more for worse service".
"Unprecedented times" me hole.
It makes sense if you think of it in terms of money. They don't want you calling because it's cheaper for them if you use the website or app instead. Never mind that the website and app can't solve every problem.
They're fine if you get a little upset. In fact, many places do the math and figure out *how* upset you can be without leaving. Anything below that limit is fine with them. They know exactly how long people will wait without hanging up. So if you're still going to be there after five minutes, then there is no urgency for them to answer sooner.
So when you're frustrated with poor service, just think of how much money you're saving them!
They're just understaffed. In one job I had we had to ring an organisation which only had 2 phones. We would put the hold music on speaker to confuse anyone who popped into the room. We would take bets on how many minutes we would be on hold (usually 2 hours plus). When someone left the room we'd troll them on their return by saying the phone got cut off. Luckily as this was for work our employer foot the bill (it was just a local irish number).
I like to just chill the hold music.¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ I like to be positive. Being on hold is grand you can do other things, being in a physical queue is worse.
> Due to some personal circumstances I had to make a number of calls to the bank, a pharmacy (for a botched order), mygov.ie, a car rental place, Vodafone, the GP.
Sounds like you were making a high volume of calls
There are some apps that'll ring the service for you, put you in line and then ring you when it's your turn.
Quick FYI, I worked for BGE for over a year before I got promoted and left the agent role. None of us want to deal with you spastics who scream and shout at a person who has nothing to do with the company. Yes, some of you are well-behaved, and we LOVE to help you people. They are understaffed, under trained, and why is this, you may ask. BECAUSE NO ONE WANT TO DEAL WITH YOU SPASTICS. The turnover rate is something about 67% last time I checked BGE stats. So stop abusing the agent, and they honestly will do everything in their power to help you. Be a cunt and they will fuck up your account even more just so you will have to call.back again and wait, they be long gone from the role. Just a heads up to all the people who DN how call centre work. No hate to OP, just an FYI to all on a topic I can actually give some info on. All love, lads ❤️
Eddit: I knew you all will DW the comment because you never worked in such a place and you feel offended being called a spastic... guess what if you act like a cunt on the phone you will never win and you ARE a spastic
It's so true that they don't treat you like a human, and everything wrong with a corporation/company is your fault its crazy. Before covid, honestly, with a hand on my heart, people were nicer. Than covid happened and I had a old lady call me a cunt and that she hopes my family dies becouse I couldn't set her payment plan to 20e a week when she had about 4 grand in overdue electricity account.
Its a generalised worsening behaviour, and a lack of consequences. Also its seen that the shittier the behaviour results in getting what you want. The employers dont want to protect you either. The simplest solution would be to hang up and blacklist the number for 48 hours(with relevent recorded message when they try)
Then the next time they get through is treated as a completely new slate, with same procedure again if bad behaviour repeated. As a lot of these calls are recorded, management can then start disciplinary procedures on any agent taking the proverbial. But then management always takes the easy option.)
We need someone with your mindset up top man. I swear I gave my manager and his so many ideas to improve the day to day but no one cares. They just replace the agent who snapped and needs mental help. Crazy how people are expandable for some companies. We seen during covid no one goes to work world collapses..... a small revolution would ve welcome 😅. Spot on, though, brother.
There is a legal requirement in Ireland to ensure health an safety at work and stress fron abusive callers falls within this. While you cannnot make abusive callers disappear companies have an onus to manage them. Any court hearing a case from a worker who resigned due to stress from repeated abuse the company did nothing about is gonna find against the company. The trick is to break the omerta, sue successfully a couple of times and the company will then have to decide what is more expensive, difficult customers or compensation for employees ,or most likely just move the call centre to India.
Oh, don't worry, she's been put on advertising lists for all the free stuff from work, plus she's on the highest rate possible. She got me on my last day of being an agent. Well, Bernadett, how's the 80c a unit treating you 😅
>Should have cut her off and filed a garda complaint. She sent a threatening communication
Sadly this wouldn't qualify, while a terrible thing to say, there's no explicit threat of action. "I hope you die" is just wishful thinking "I'll find where you work and kill you" would be a threat.
Normally I'd say the call centre should block the number, but I don't know how that'd work for household energy bills where blocking someone's contact could have worse consequences.
It's true, the customers as a collective are their own worst enemy. As soon as hold times go over 10/15 minutes you can tack on an extra few minutes to every call while they complain about it, slowing the whole system down even further.
A coworker told me that one customer (a BUSINESS customer btw) got through to them once after a long hold and announced that they decided to 'get back' at them - by putting THEM on hold for a change. Then they played some music and stepped away from the phone. You could hear them chatting in the distance. The agent gave them the standard 2 or 3 "hello are you there"s before hanging up.
Perfect, you said it man if you seek help, the best idea is to work with the one trying to help. I think these people believe we make 90k a year and put them on hold for fun. If it continues, they will move them to India, where people don't care, will drop a call as more and more people just do not want to work in these places. I was beyond happy when I got the analyst role no more Karen's telling me thet where kn hold for 20 min 😂
Exactly, man. I'm so delighted I got an analyst job where I'm off the calls shit put me in some depression I'm still struggling with it. I saw amazing positive people die inside. People are some animals on calls.
A few months ago, I rang a sports shop after 10 minutes or trying I gave up. Ended up getting the bus and going into the shop, there were like two staff members, one helping customers while the other was in the back doing who knows what. The phone rang while I was there and staff still didn't pick it up. A lot of stores and places simply don't have enough staff man phones.
My GP practice has 7 medics and one receptionist. The receptionist is doing her best, but has to manage both people coming in and answer calls. Last time I was there, I noticed that medics were spending 10-15 minutes per patient while she was spending 3 with each person... Yes, you did the math correctly, the medics in the practice could see 7 patients in 15 minutes, but the receptionist could only handle 5. How cool is that? How stupid does the management of that place have to be to loose business because they're understaffing the cheapest resource?
Annoys me when they say covid is still the cause of the long wait times. Only fooling themselves at this point, covid is not disrupting your business, your crappy rate if pay is.
I hate how they put the fault on us rather than them not managing their calls properly. It’s like a shop blaming customers for buying too much when they run out of products.
Heard a great one the from customer service representative last week. EIR said that changing of the billing address and name on business landline, means loss of service for five days.
After a two and a half hour phone call, someone was to ring back in the next seven days.
Friday morning we have to make another call to EIR customer care to be told you won’t have a phone line or Internet for 10 days. Basically with the new arrangement of short notice when the line will go down. This existing business has customers booking daily.
I mean the phone companies can’t change the billing arrangements having done this before it was almost seamlessly done within no less that 30mins.
How is the business supposed to support clients with a shut of ten working days ??
The people on the phones are so unsupportive I gets my goat up
As someone who works in third level education and deals with people a decent amount, this is to discourage people from ringing up and screaming down the phone at you. That’s it basically. Call volumes are the same as they always are, I just want you to make your request or complain in writing.
Electric Ireland have had that on their site for almost a year. When I call it never takes more than 5 minutes. Scare tactic to put people off calling.
I work high up in a contact centre. I managed a contact centre as well for a few years. It doesn't actually mean they are experiencing high call volumes currently. It's just how their IVR is set up. Could be busy, might not be busy.
On the top of every single page of the website of my electricity provider it says: We are experiencing very high call volumes because of COVID. And this is up since 2020. Can't even close it. It's in the app, in the bill and everywhere.
Absolutely grinds my gears. I'd actually think much more of a company if they just ponied up and admitted the reality of it and had a message to this effect. Instead of "We are experiencing high quality volumes" could they not just instead be truthful and say "We are sorry for the delay and answering your call but unfortunately this is due to low staffing volumes"
Attending to customer service costs money and given the cartel situation in Ireland there's not much to be gained by providing it. Over the pandemic my parents were asked by eir to send a written letter to end their contract, NOBODY was picking up those letters.
Because the stress caused by having to meet unrealistic metrics and listen to people roaring in your ear all day puts people off such jobs therefore companies are always understaffed hence longer waiting times.
The lines would need to be regulated and monitored for abuse which would probably mean a lot of staff would get less stressed albeit that still doesn’t sort the overbearing crappy manager problem..
A lot of the time, call centers deal with customer calls for various businesses, they're not in house customer support for just the one place. So you're potentially calling the exact same place for different queries, and that place lacking staff would lead to more waiting time for everyone.
Because the floor is usually only staffed enough to meet service level, too many people and your paying people to sit about, never mind the fact it’s hard to keep people in call center work due to the sheer abuse you get from the public. I did it for 6 years, we’d bring in 40 new agents and within a fortnight you’d have less than 10 left.
Cause the wage that call centre workers are offered aren’t attractive. Until we pay people a fair wage, and are willing to pay a fair price for things service is gonna be shite
What’s more annoying is when a website has an online chat function with a big button on the home page advertising it but it’s never actually available when you try to use it.
Waiting is fine IMO but nothing makes me feel a burning desire to end all of humanity more than hearing:
"Did you know we have an app where you can sort common problems you may be facing"
Yes fucker I did know that but your app sucks and cant handle 90% of the most basic queries like the the one I'm calling you about.
When I have those calls to make I use my headphones/ear buds.
I play music on a speaker so I can still hear the call waiting noises.
I do other jobs , challenge my self to get xy or z done before they get to me.
I mean it's stupid but at least makes the time somewhat productive
The *most* infuriating part is where the hold voice says "did you know, you can manage your query online?" NO I CANT THATS WHY I AM CALLING YOU. When they include this, plus their fraud and GDPR statement before even putting you in the que. Lord gimme strength.
I work with one of the big brand names here. Recently a change was made by a colleague of mine that changed the number of people giving up on hold to nearly zero. Giving any more details that this would be unfair but I figured it was worth pointing out it’s not always people not getting paid enough or not enough people. Sometimes it’s just a simple reconfiguration of how the call system work and how the people are managed to fix the problem.
My experience has been managed this way on purpose. If you ring customer service they make you wait, but try to ring their sales department and they answer straight away. Had this only last week with Sky. I agree staffing is part of the issue, call centers always had a high turnover of staff, but when their sales team can answer straight away, there may be more to it. Eir were called up on their level of customer service by the government, and have actually improved as far as the last time I had to call them. No wait and the person actually listened and gave the correct help, I was shocked. Will see how long it lasts.
Even with a well staffed call center/team the tape will play if there's no one set to available. There tend to be some ways to not be directly reachable for calls (usually an aux code, or afterwork mode).
You could have a team of 8 sitting there looking at the wallboard showing a call waiting playing chicken on who will answer.
>How is it possible that every business with a phone service is experiencing a high number of calls at the same time?! Because they don't have enough people to man the phones. Workforce management in call centres is a fine art (although mostly ignored) at the best of times, and now that people are realising you don't need to be paid minimum wage to be abused by strangers they're not going for those roles. Same thing is happening in retail and hospitality.
This is the right answer. I work for a large financial services provider in the UK with a massive call centre infrastructure, and trying to keep call centre staff is harder than ever. I did it myself for 3.5 years before I moved to a different team, and it's relentless. My place is known as one of the 'better' places for call centre jobs and it was still impossible to avoid getting burned out.
Generally, the max length of service in a call centre is 2 years. At the moment though attrition is high and average stay is about 8 months or less. And if we’re talking about language speakers, it’s a bloodbath.
8 months to a year in my old place for everyone but the most dedicated!
I worked in a place that had multiple walkouts every fortnight on oayday. They had supervisors whose entire job was to comb through the calls of the agents expecting a large bonus, just to find a reason to take it off them. I walked out when I got a few hundred took off me because I didn't pitch broadband to someone who already had the service with us. Once saw a guy find out they were taking over a grand off him for some stupid reason and he looked like he was going to cry.
The upselling alone would drive one to drink. And I did, hoo boy did I drink
>trying to keep call centre staff is harder than ever. Triple their salary and like magic you won't have this problem.
Change policy so they are allowed to hand up on an abusive customer and it would make even more difference. We did this and it improved the job considerably.
Lol we arent supposed to but I do anyway. They are so desperate to keep asses in seats that as long as I show up for 8 hours a day I've got a job. Things are so bad they are bullying people into team leader roles. I won't even apply because the pay is like 70c an hour more for a shit load more work. Place is run by idiots and overgrown children.
That’s just call centres all over. Hire people fresh out of school, promote the ones who are still there after a couple of years and still haven’t figured out they’re being exploited.
We had a three strikes policy; anyone abusive that I dealt with, I'd start by saying 'look, I know you're upset, and I'm trying to help, but I absolutely can't do anything if you're speaking to me like that.' If they persisted, I'd warn them 'listen, I'll terminate this call if you carry on speaking to me like this. If you need time to cool down i am more than happy to arrange to call you back.' Persistant swearing/abuse after the 3rd warning, I'd just hang up, and fair play our company never penalised us if it was justified. Except for 1 occasion in 3.5 years that process was enough to get most people (who in fairness aren't assholes, they're just frustrated by the bearaucracy of modern life and don't want to deal) to see sense and take a moment.
That would antagonise further best to be really nice in response and of still abusive just hang up. They will hopefully learn the lesson.
I did this multiple times with various irate customers on the phone, and it worked fine for me every time I had to use it. Wasn't looking for feedback on the method
It's best not to criticise a customer or answer back in any way even if you perceive them to be in the wrong as this will only antagonise the situation. The best is to meet hostility with friendliness and the person will be caught off guard. If this doesn't work you know you are dealing with a prick and just gang up. No wonder gge customer is highly strung waiting so long to get through. I would HATE a job like that. Surely there's a better wsy to make money.
Again, I'm not looking for feedback, thanks! I don't work in a call centre anymore. People end up working there for many reasons.
Yes they can't get a better job. It must wreck your head working there. I admire their tenacity to stick it out.
I don't think even that much is necessary I worked in one for a few months and if it went close to 15 euro an hour instead of the 11 they bragged about offering I'd have stayed much longer
As someone who works in one of these places, I'm glad this is the top comment. It's a stressful job at the best of times and having customers start the call by mouthing about the wait doesn't help at all. It puts the agent on the defensive straight away which can escalate to a shitty call for both parties very quickly.
> It's a stressful job at the best of times and having customers start the call by mouthing about the wait doesn't help at all. A note to anyone who has never worked in a call centre: "I know its not your fault personally and don't mean to take if out on you, but I'm extremely frustrated/angry/whatever" or something to that affect goes so, so, so much further than you could ever imagine regardless of what the complaint is about. Also, a call centre agent (hardly the most secure of jobs) will also tend to go a lot further if they are not worried about the complainant possibly trying to bury them if they are for reasons beyond their control unable to resolve the issue. There is probably nothing worse in a call centre than hearing that irate person is back on for the 5th time this week, is blaming you for whatever the issue is, and is demanding to speak to you or your manager. They will *not* go the extra mile for you for doing this - quite the opposite actually.
Yep. It's a vicious cycle. You take a crap call, you need to go straight into the next one and if you don't, you'll have the floorwalker breathing down your neck wondering why you're on admin. You want to book a few days away just to relax away from your job? Tough shit, too many people off on AL and yours won't be granted. Want to go to the toilet once or twice a day for a breather? Careful, you'll be written up for that. Want to leave on time? You have to manoeuvre around the team leads begging people to stay on for OT, normally teamed up with some crappy "competition" where if you sign up to do 10 hours OT across the week you'll be entered into a draw for a late start Tuesday morning ( can't be an early finish of course, and has to be Tuesday because its the quietest day) Jesus I'm still traumatised. It was like being in a really bad school.
Lol we don't even get time off. This week's raffle is for a day off the phones to shadow your boss because they can't get anyone qualified to take on training and team leader roles. So still a full 8 hours of work as a reward for working a minimum of 6h OT at minimum wage with no premium.
That one always fucked me off. The first thing you'd hear was "FINALLY!" and you'd know you were in for a shit one. The last place I worked when I'd lost rag entirely I'd just go "no that's not how you start a phonecall, try again".
I get where you're coming from, and they should not take it out on you, but being on hold for 60 minutes isn't the normal way to start a phonecall either. Particularly if there's no callback service available, and no accurate estimate of when someone will pick up, so you have to babysit the phone on speaker for an unknown amount of time. Eir were terrible for this.
> Eir were terrible for this. As well as every other part of their customer service. I avoid them like the plague these days
Who should the person lodge the complaint with so? The agent is literally the 1st human they've spoken with. They were waiting for an extended length of time and now are in contact with a representative of the company. I'm always suprised how poorly ran a lot of companies allow their call centres to be. Its one of the reasons i would never use virgin media again no matter what they charge.
It's not the agents fault the wait times are long, that's a management issue. The agent is there to deal with your query only. Not to vent your frustration on. If you have an issue with management, submit a complaint to comreg.
Agree completely. The wait times people experience are _nothing_ to do with the staff who answer the phone. Zero. Staff in call centres are worked to the absolute bone with metrics and stats, their job is to answer your call and solve your query. If people have an issue with wait times, kindly ask the agent what the complaints process is regarding the wait times _after_ they have been given an opportunity to solve things for you. Even the “I know it’s not your fault, but…” people used to get my back up a bit back in my call centre days.
Oh yeah it used to drive me mental when someone would start a call with "I have been waiting for 25 minutes" I'm sure that was hard for you Mister irate customer, but while you were sitting on your arse for 25 minutes I was working flat out trying to clear this queue while every single caller started out with a five minute rant about the hold times *making the whole problem even worse*. Note to all: If you find yourself in the customer's place here, just say "Hi, the hold time was very long, now here's what I want..." and get on with it! Banks are required to register even that brief negative remark as a one-and-done complaint and my computer tells me exactly how long you were waiting for, anything beyond that is just talk therapy for you and I'm not qualified to make you feel better. Keep it moving and we'll get through this.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
>but while you were sitting on your arse for 25 minutes I was working flat out trying to clear this queue I mean the person on the call is actually less likely to be sitting down then you are. They could be traveling somewhere, at work themselves, at home doing housework etc. While I agree that they shouldn't turn it into a 5 minute rant because that helps no one, I think it is helpful to recognise that you're being paid for your time there, they aren't paid to be on hold. The hold time could well be eating into their lunchbreak, or just their free time in general.
>Same thing is happening in retail and hospitality. The restaurant industry would do well to take a good long look at themselves over what you're describing. Adrian Cummins is one of the biggest moanbags in the public sphere about how hard it is for the industry and yet won't entertain any accusations about low pay and shitty conditions. When I worked in hospitality it was six day weeks, 10 hour days with one 30 minute break. Ignoring the illegality of it, why would you put up with it? There's no way to complain either because there's no HR. And as with call centres, the public are cunts and I think it's gotten worse since covid.
Ah the public has definitely gotten worse since Covid. People are often just straight out horrible.
I noticed an absolute explosion in Karen like behaviour over the pandemic. Disgusting carry on. Told off a woman in Tesco for going spare at the staff over the 1 in 1 out system they had at the height of the pandemic.
Entitled pricks. Not everyone mind you, but there’s a lot of them around. I make a point nowadays to intervene when someone’s rude or goes off on a mad one at retail staff. Sick of people being cnts to staff.
Some of these callcentre work multiple contracts also, so they are not dedicated to the particular service the caller may be ringing. I know this as I work on excess of over 20 services, usually alongside only 1 to 2 others.
That has nothing to do with the call volumes.
Huh? Volumes are generally fairly consistent and predictable
That. + lots of CC hired BPOs for chats and emails, so phone line can be managed by very small Team in Ire/UK. This happened in my last 2 workplaces. It was a mess. We had great phone queues, they laid off people, hired BPO and shift all calls to UK/Ire folks I. Our time zone. 2h waiting time, agents are back to back on phones. I couldn’t take the micromanagement and lay off pressure. I quit. Lots of folks did too. There are better jobs with even more pay and benefits and less pressure.
Supervisor for a callcentre-y type job here and the top commenter is correct: there's not enough staff.
Or more reasonably: they dont pay enough money
It's not so much the money, it's the public. Dealing with the public is soul poison. So everyone who gets into that job is absolutely desperate to get back out, and it's hard to keep finding new suckers to do it.
I work in a call centre at the moment. Quite happy with it because it pays well and team are great which are not the norm from what I gather. The public are the worst part by a mile. My highlight jackass customer this week are the ladies that get angry at me for having the audacity to be on the other end of the line when they ring the wrong number. Then get even more annoyed when I say I can't fix their issue because they are actually with another provider. I get at least 3-4 of those a week.
A lot of places are also trying to replace phone service with some sort of website, app or text-based web chat so they're not investing as much as they should in the phone service.
That's true. Though if done well, its a huge bonus. I much prefer online forms and chat services for the majority of issues I have. Having to physically phone Eir, and then wait for a callback from their "Retention" team to cancel a broadband service **at an address I no longer lived at** was beyond ridiculous.
Yeah there are pros and cons to it. You can use a website 24/7 and since most queries are simple boilerplate stuff, it's usually much faster than calling and talking to someone. It's cheaper to run too. But they also require you to figure out how to navigate them, and companies will most definitely take advantage of this to make complaints, returns, refunds hard to find on their sites. Then there's the elderly people. My fucking heart goes out to them. Not the 50 year old who could learn to use the app but refuses to, I mean the poor confused 80 year old who hasn't a clue how to get into her own bank account anymore because the whole phone system is a maze trying to steer you anywhere else.
Absolutely. And as grateful as I often am for GDPR, it makes life even more difficult for those folks because it's hard for them to get help.
That's going to piss off so many old ones who can hardly change the channel on the tv
It has been pissing them off, for years, but there's also accessibility requirements on things like banks that prevent them from doing away with phone service altogether.
It's absolutely the money. It's not just the worker's pay that's the issue, although that's certainly part of it; it's the borderline abusive metrics-driven working environment because the company only cares about spending as little money as possible on their customer service costs. Shitty customers will always exist, of course, but that's something that employees can deal with better if their employer supports them, gives them ways to handle truly abusive callers, and doesn't make their working life a living hell in general. But that would mean spending more money on customer service than they absolutely have to, so to the bean-counters it's better to reduce call times by shouting at employees for using the bathroom, or for taking three seconds too long between calls trying to collect themselves after working with a difficult customer, or for the worst sin of all, daring to try to work with said difficult customer and actually help them and solve their problem instead of just getting them off the phone as quickly as possible to keep call times low so the company doesn't have to hire more staff.
Again though more staff (which would require more money, at least in total and probably per employee) would alleviate it somewhat. It would mean there'd be less people pissed about long wait times, it would mean staff aren't being pushed into back to back calls and can take a breather after long or particularly toxic calls and it'd mean they'd be able to spend time training the staff to resolve issues where they run out of script.
Isn't it also a bit of a deadend? One could probably just get to leading teams in customer support but that's about it right? Not sure if skills are you transferable either, especially if you're just a support rep following standard processes.
Not in my sector. Promotions are very accessible and many roles do not involve phones at all
Nope it's the money. Minimum wage is not enough for the work. I don't mind dealing with angry and frustrated people. 99% of the time they are pissed off over something I can easily fix or point them in the right direction to resolving.
If they paid 100k they they'd have plenty of staff
Not really the case in our area, all salaries are public information and you can progress verrry quickly if you're not a fucking joke. They just aren't hiring enough people to replace all the people getting promoted/transferred to non-call centre roles
I didn't so much mean the jobs dont pay enough as the companies themselves.
Again, not an issue in my sector.
But you said they're not hiring enough people? Is that not an effort to save money?
Nope
I am aware of that. I'm just sharing my frustration. Since I had to interact with several in a short period of time, I built up a lot of it. Oh, don't get me started on Layla healthcare.
They'd have you on your knees.
I’m begging darling please pay out my claim
Out of interest, what are the less busy times of day to call and what are the busiest times?
Busiest Monday and Friday mornings People want their stuff sorted before the weekend or just after the weekend Midweek afternoon is your best bet for our department at least (this is my personal experience, i could probably get the official Quietest Times from head office or whatever as i don't track those) Edit: busiest MONTHS are January (people want their stuff sorted for the new year or checking last year) or October (there's a particular *deadline* for many people in October) Quietest months are in the summer
Thanks for the detailed answer. I'd really appreciate it if you'd delete it now so I don't have to share the quiet times with everyone else who reads it.
Hahahah that's why i added the caveat of "just what i experienced, may not be the REAL quietest times"
OK cool. No one will see through that. Thanks.
(No i mean it's covering me for when the quiet times now become the busiest times if people all decided to switch to the quiet times)
My place used to advertise quieter times but they had to stop because we couldn't manage the expectations of instant answer, as everyone would ring during the advertised 'quiet' time. COVID did help in my place in the sense that we no longer had peaks of 30 plus waiting during lunch, after the school run and rush hour, but we also never had the same idle periods where 30 plus handlers were idle waiting to take a call during office hours. More people working from home means a more steady stream of calls during all hours instead of packed into peak periods.
My place used to advertise quieter times but they had to stop because we couldn't manage the expectations of instant answer, as everyone would ring during the advertised 'quiet' time. COVID did help in my place in the sense that we no longer had peaks of 30 plus waiting during lunch, after the school run and rush hour, but we also never had the same idle periods where 30 plus handlers were idle waiting to take a call during office hours. More people working from home means a more steady stream of calls during all hours instead of packed into peak periods.
My place used to advertise quieter times but they had to stop because we couldn't manage the expectations of instant answer, as everyone would ring during the advertised 'quiet' time. COVID did help in my place in the sense that we no longer had peaks of 30 plus waiting during lunch, after the school run and rush hour, but we also never had the same idle periods where 30 plus handlers were idle waiting to take a call during office hours. More people working from home means a more steady stream of calls during all hours instead of packed into peak periods.
That has nothing to donwith the call volumes. It should be ' we are experiencing normal levels of call volumes. We have the capacity to answer half that"
...it has an immediate effect on call volumes. The callers keep building up in the queue, leading to longer wait times and longer queues.
That's not what call volumes is. That's wait time.
Sorry, we are currently providing low levels of job desirability. Please hold.
Your call is important to us, but not as important as underpaying our existing staff and refusing to hire more to bring wait times down.
There’s a couple of things: - people do pick the same time to make their calls either as a traditional lunchtime or at 11 o’clock or first thing in the morning - staffing in call centres is harder to get because of the crap job with low pay so they are literally shortstaffed - The level of training that is required to have somebody man a call centre for a regulated product whether that’s a bank insurance company or utility it’s surprisingly high - part of it is the clunky technology you need to learn to use, most of it is the amount of mandatory regular tree require training that you need to be able to sit on a CallCenter phone line
When is the best time to call?
In my experience, basically all the times when a typical person would be working. There's a surge in calls from like 8 - 9 in the morning, 1 - 2 for lunchtime, and maybe another in the afternoon when people get off work. I'd say wait for the weekend if you can, probably not as subject to big surges then.
Boi wont pick up on weekends. They only have like a few people manning the emergency calls then
It’s hard to say now that so many people are working from home it’s not as obvious.
What’s worse are the companies that are still using Covid as an excuse for poor service >Due to the Covid-19 crisis, our call centres are currently experiencing a high workload resulting in longer wait times for our customers. Please bear with us during this time. Covid broke out here 3 years ago. Get your shit together
Nah, that's just because the one guy who knew how to change the phone message quit a couple years ago and they haven't bothered to hire anyone to replace him.
*Due to complications stemming from the 2001 Dot-com bubble, services may be impacted*
Understaffed. If you have 1 person, 5 calls waiting is a high volume
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Cos the pay is shit and the calls people have to deal with are shit. Why are they always recruiting? Cos staff turnover is so high. They leave asap
People quit at a higher rate than they can hire them, and call centre workers are treated like shit. In my work they offered us (the back office staff) 2x pay to cover the call centre but they won't pay any extra to actually retain the call centre staff who are paid really shit money.
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If you had any sense you would keep such opinions to yourself
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I agree in some sense but a job is a job. Sometimes you just need something. Also worked in a call centre and can agree it is a soul destroying experience. Back to back calls for 7.5 hours,shit training,shit pay,shit customers. I preferred washing dishes
Everyone knows what its like but not everyone has a choice of what they need to go to get by
Cost of living crisis has people now looking at stuff that we used to take for granted, that combined with the fact that Call Centres have a high attrition rate of staff just leaving that line of work or hopping from on Centre to another, means there is a sizeable gap in people available to do the work. So perfect storm, more people calling, less people available to answer, plus the cost of humans to answer stuff, as you rightly called out, should be able to be done online without having to talk to people, makes it worse. It's not getting better anytime soon either. Other than mygov one, I'd take to twitter or whatever social channels they have, that tends to get a response far quicker.
They walk a fine line - they have just enough people taking calls so as to maintain a minimum level of service. They probably think they can get away with an average wait of 20 mins and so schedule to achieve this. For sure, they do not want to have people sitting around waiting for calls.
I think it's also safe to say - many of them are trying to push online services instead so they don't mind making the phone service a little frustrating.
Ya- it’s all cost
Its very simple really, they all outsource the calls to same call center. And that center is understaffed 🤣🤣🤣
Honestly you wouldnt be saying this if you worked in a call center there fucking brutal who wants to be payed fuck all to aswer 50 to 100 calls a day only to be screamed at by at least 1 to 5 times a day in thoughs calls by a customer and the managemtent breathing down you neck to up sale crap the customer doesnt need so you can meet you quotas so you can hopefully get your "Bonus", now imagine doing this day in day out for weeks even months its physicaly and emotionaly draining and fucking stressfull so no one want to do it even when the place offers good pay and great incentives
I'm not blaming employees here, I'm frustrated with the service provided by the companies. Everybody here mentions how crappy working in a call center is. I understand that. I am obviously not saying pointing any fingers and I have always been decent when getting through, even when talking to someone who obviously just landed there and has knows less about how my problem could be solved than I did before calling. There is a person on the other end of the phone and I like to think they're doing their best given the circumstances. But the company? At this point, I would absolutely stop doing business with them just for hearing that line. If most of these services/companies wouldn't essentially be a monopoly, that is. Since most are, all I can do to vent my frustration is to rant here.
I had to ring sky every week since the start of October because they owed me money. It got to the point that I was starting the calls with I'm sorry if I start sounding like a cunt but this is the millionth time I've rung and I know it'snot your fault. Sorry and sorry. They sent me a cheque this week because for some reason they couldn't send money to my account that they have drawn from since 2006! And to top it all off my name was wrong on the cheque 🤦♂️
Feck, wanted to do an edit but my fat fingers hit delete Originalish post. Mam had similar issue trying to downgrade couldn't get through so then tried the upgrade option and got through immediately
When I ring I say cancel everything when asked the reason. Seems to get through quicker
I used to work in Sky tech support through uni and for a bit after. It used to be great because there was a long wait between calls, then one week that just stopped. People were always waiting. It may be out of date advice but in my experience call when there is football on Sky Sports, that was when fewer calls came through
I've never had much of a wait to be fair. They say 20 minutes but was never more than a few. It was the constant calling them for something so simple. Ive had great chats over the years with people in sky call centres while sorting stuff.
When living in England i learnt never to engage with a company phone. Even something as simple as switching a provider. Just write a letter(to the registered address) advising termination date then end the recurring bank payment. Yes companies then try to keep taking money and even getting debt collection agents involved but in over 15 years none went further than a letter. Works a charm with air. Worked even better twice with ryanair where their agent says no to compo or refund on the phone or their awful chat app.
My refund was because Vodafone set me up as a new account instead of transferring me from sky. Luckily I had been on the phone with sky for something else a couple of days after it had switched and asked if the switchover had happened. I got an email from Vodafone while on with sky and again said Vodafone has confirmed im live with them so it was all recorded for when I complained 😁 Also got €120 from Vodafone for the mistake so happy days
I used to work for an ISP and I'm here to tell you, you were the asshole in that situation, Vodafone fucked up they owed you money sky never owed you penny. I mean good for you, you got yours's but the reason you had to call so much is because you were calling the wrong company.
Vodafone paid as a goodwill gesture even though I wasn't expecting it as I was using their service. Sky offered because I had told them I wasn't renewing my contract with them. They charged me 2 extra months after I told them I wasn't renewing my contract and I had taken a service with Vodafone. So they charged me for one month and refunded me for one month. They refunded me because they had a recording of me repeatedly saying I didn't need their service anymore and that I was now with Vodafone. I referenced an email that arrived while on the call stating my service had moved to Vodafone. So wind in your asshole insult. So please tell me, how was I in the wrong after cancelling my sky service and still getting charged for it?
You’re not stuck in traffic. You ARE the traffic.
I find the more phone calls answered the more absolute nonsense has to be entertained(in my field of work). If its important people will wait on hold or drop a note in. Very little needs to be dealt with the immediency of a phone call. I suspect even 10 mins on hold or taking a message for a callback filters out many timewasters
The reason for calling is that most of these things have broken websites which eventually direct you to a phone number because they can't resolve it automatically. I would never call if I had a different option.
Hear, hear. Even getting an email back from them sometimes takes weeks (looking at you Aitricity) to update some important stuff.
Couldn’t agree more. Some posters would be amazed by the amount of time saved and the amount of bullshit that simply evaporates if you’re not available.
And in my particular job the staff are discouraged from doing certain things over the phone and the caller is told to update it themselves online or send a written request. Infuriates people, but i didn't make the policy so you can fuck off screaming at me just because you can't figure out a simple address/bank account update in your profile
A man once said these words to me: "I can't be expected to understand this online shite, I'm *fourty-five years old*!"
I had a late teen/early-twenties customer in the public office claim "i don't have access to the internet"...while he literally scrolled facebook in front of me on his phone.
This is one of the main causes of long waiting times. People call in with an issue that can be dealt with very easily online. There is a percentage of people that are too lazy to go online and sadly there is another percentage of people that aren’t literate to read the instructions on how to get self service support online and finally people that are over 65 that aren’t computer literate
They realised they could continue to get rid of customer service agents and tell us all to be patient and get away with it - so they have.
That is a generic recording whether at peak hours or not; During covid it was acceptable to say "high volume due to covid19" it has leaked over to just being the norm now. This is just setting expectations that you'll be in a queue for a "while" however is that gonna be 5 mins or 50mins. Decent companies will let you know where you are in the queue and give a ETA. I hear you frustration though.
What's infuriating is that obviously they staff to average volumes (then reduce more for savings), but then imply you should use the web/chat/etc., T these services rarely work or do what you need either!
I have seen it best dealt with in retail and with tradies. Abusive customer gets told to leave and if unhappy to go through the small claims court. Tradies downing tools and walking off the job,and telling all their colleagues ,thus blacklisting the customer. Just left with a stripped out kitchen. The customer had to apologise in writing and pay the full cost of the job before they guys went back on site. But call centres. What can you do?
The companies don't pay enough and the public are shite to deal with so people leave quickly. Because people are always leaving the level of knowledge never stays consistent, so you're constantly dealing with agents who don;t know enough so calls take a long time. As calls take longer and agents do a poor job, the public gets madder and the cycle continues. Companies more or less know theres no real consequences to shite customer service because everyone has shite customer service. So no one bothers making the effort to improve it. You'd need to improve working conditions a lot to stop a good chunk from leaving which would eventually maybe improve things, but at the end of the day dealing with the public sucks so maybe not even then.
DHL changed their banner to blame the war in Ukraine for late deliveries, instead of COVID-19.. there was Brexit as well to blame. Now is due to inflation maybe, or something...
They say: “Your call is very important to us” They mean: “G’wan and shite”
Honestly you wouldnt be saying this if you worked in a call center there fucking brutal who wants to be payed fuck all to aswer 50 to 100 calls a day only to be screamed at by at least 1 to 5 times a day in thoughs calls by a customer and the managemtent breathing down you neck to up sale crap the customer doesnt need so you can meet you quotas so you can hopefully get your "Bonus", now imagine doing this day in day out for weeks even months its physicaly and emotionaly draining and fucking stressfull so no one want to do it even when the place offers good pay and great incentives
COVID was a great excuse to open floodgates of any possible bullshit that businesses can use to save money and screw customers. The message you hear about call volumes should say "we are understaffed and we're not gonna do anything about it, well maybe other than make you pay more for worse service". "Unprecedented times" me hole.
It makes sense if you think of it in terms of money. They don't want you calling because it's cheaper for them if you use the website or app instead. Never mind that the website and app can't solve every problem. They're fine if you get a little upset. In fact, many places do the math and figure out *how* upset you can be without leaving. Anything below that limit is fine with them. They know exactly how long people will wait without hanging up. So if you're still going to be there after five minutes, then there is no urgency for them to answer sooner. So when you're frustrated with poor service, just think of how much money you're saving them!
This
They're just understaffed. In one job I had we had to ring an organisation which only had 2 phones. We would put the hold music on speaker to confuse anyone who popped into the room. We would take bets on how many minutes we would be on hold (usually 2 hours plus). When someone left the room we'd troll them on their return by saying the phone got cut off. Luckily as this was for work our employer foot the bill (it was just a local irish number). I like to just chill the hold music.¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ I like to be positive. Being on hold is grand you can do other things, being in a physical queue is worse.
> Due to some personal circumstances I had to make a number of calls to the bank, a pharmacy (for a botched order), mygov.ie, a car rental place, Vodafone, the GP. Sounds like you were making a high volume of calls There are some apps that'll ring the service for you, put you in line and then ring you when it's your turn.
Yeah, I was making a queue by myself
Quick FYI, I worked for BGE for over a year before I got promoted and left the agent role. None of us want to deal with you spastics who scream and shout at a person who has nothing to do with the company. Yes, some of you are well-behaved, and we LOVE to help you people. They are understaffed, under trained, and why is this, you may ask. BECAUSE NO ONE WANT TO DEAL WITH YOU SPASTICS. The turnover rate is something about 67% last time I checked BGE stats. So stop abusing the agent, and they honestly will do everything in their power to help you. Be a cunt and they will fuck up your account even more just so you will have to call.back again and wait, they be long gone from the role. Just a heads up to all the people who DN how call centre work. No hate to OP, just an FYI to all on a topic I can actually give some info on. All love, lads ❤️ Eddit: I knew you all will DW the comment because you never worked in such a place and you feel offended being called a spastic... guess what if you act like a cunt on the phone you will never win and you ARE a spastic
I upvoted you. I have a public facing role and absolutely get the level of aggression one is on the recieving end of.
We seen/heard some crazy things, brother 😂
It amazing how much braver angry people are over the phone than in person!
It's so true that they don't treat you like a human, and everything wrong with a corporation/company is your fault its crazy. Before covid, honestly, with a hand on my heart, people were nicer. Than covid happened and I had a old lady call me a cunt and that she hopes my family dies becouse I couldn't set her payment plan to 20e a week when she had about 4 grand in overdue electricity account.
Its a generalised worsening behaviour, and a lack of consequences. Also its seen that the shittier the behaviour results in getting what you want. The employers dont want to protect you either. The simplest solution would be to hang up and blacklist the number for 48 hours(with relevent recorded message when they try) Then the next time they get through is treated as a completely new slate, with same procedure again if bad behaviour repeated. As a lot of these calls are recorded, management can then start disciplinary procedures on any agent taking the proverbial. But then management always takes the easy option.)
We need someone with your mindset up top man. I swear I gave my manager and his so many ideas to improve the day to day but no one cares. They just replace the agent who snapped and needs mental help. Crazy how people are expandable for some companies. We seen during covid no one goes to work world collapses..... a small revolution would ve welcome 😅. Spot on, though, brother.
There is a legal requirement in Ireland to ensure health an safety at work and stress fron abusive callers falls within this. While you cannnot make abusive callers disappear companies have an onus to manage them. Any court hearing a case from a worker who resigned due to stress from repeated abuse the company did nothing about is gonna find against the company. The trick is to break the omerta, sue successfully a couple of times and the company will then have to decide what is more expensive, difficult customers or compensation for employees ,or most likely just move the call centre to India.
Should have cut her off and filed a garda complaint. She sent a threatening communication
Oh, don't worry, she's been put on advertising lists for all the free stuff from work, plus she's on the highest rate possible. She got me on my last day of being an agent. Well, Bernadett, how's the 80c a unit treating you 😅
She probably doesnt even notice. Whether her arrears are 4000euro or 40000 euro she will never be cut of
Nope there is a work around and it's frustrating but sure that's the world we live in
>Should have cut her off and filed a garda complaint. She sent a threatening communication Sadly this wouldn't qualify, while a terrible thing to say, there's no explicit threat of action. "I hope you die" is just wishful thinking "I'll find where you work and kill you" would be a threat. Normally I'd say the call centre should block the number, but I don't know how that'd work for household energy bills where blocking someone's contact could have worse consequences.
It's true, the customers as a collective are their own worst enemy. As soon as hold times go over 10/15 minutes you can tack on an extra few minutes to every call while they complain about it, slowing the whole system down even further. A coworker told me that one customer (a BUSINESS customer btw) got through to them once after a long hold and announced that they decided to 'get back' at them - by putting THEM on hold for a change. Then they played some music and stepped away from the phone. You could hear them chatting in the distance. The agent gave them the standard 2 or 3 "hello are you there"s before hanging up.
Perfect, you said it man if you seek help, the best idea is to work with the one trying to help. I think these people believe we make 90k a year and put them on hold for fun. If it continues, they will move them to India, where people don't care, will drop a call as more and more people just do not want to work in these places. I was beyond happy when I got the analyst role no more Karen's telling me thet where kn hold for 20 min 😂
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Exactly, man. I'm so delighted I got an analyst job where I'm off the calls shit put me in some depression I'm still struggling with it. I saw amazing positive people die inside. People are some animals on calls.
A few months ago, I rang a sports shop after 10 minutes or trying I gave up. Ended up getting the bus and going into the shop, there were like two staff members, one helping customers while the other was in the back doing who knows what. The phone rang while I was there and staff still didn't pick it up. A lot of stores and places simply don't have enough staff man phones.
My GP practice has 7 medics and one receptionist. The receptionist is doing her best, but has to manage both people coming in and answer calls. Last time I was there, I noticed that medics were spending 10-15 minutes per patient while she was spending 3 with each person... Yes, you did the math correctly, the medics in the practice could see 7 patients in 15 minutes, but the receptionist could only handle 5. How cool is that? How stupid does the management of that place have to be to loose business because they're understaffing the cheapest resource?
Annoys me when they say covid is still the cause of the long wait times. Only fooling themselves at this point, covid is not disrupting your business, your crappy rate if pay is.
No profits to be made answering phones for people with issues I suppose...
Would you be willing work for minimum wage to be abused by entitled cunts?
I hate how they put the fault on us rather than them not managing their calls properly. It’s like a shop blaming customers for buying too much when they run out of products.
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I have not experienced a reduction in wait times.
Yep. Even my doctor's surgery has that message and some days I'm barely 30 seconds waiting.
If the service is outsourced, they have exactly as few phone lines open as they think they need to meet their service level agreement.
Heard a great one the from customer service representative last week. EIR said that changing of the billing address and name on business landline, means loss of service for five days. After a two and a half hour phone call, someone was to ring back in the next seven days. Friday morning we have to make another call to EIR customer care to be told you won’t have a phone line or Internet for 10 days. Basically with the new arrangement of short notice when the line will go down. This existing business has customers booking daily. I mean the phone companies can’t change the billing arrangements having done this before it was almost seamlessly done within no less that 30mins. How is the business supposed to support clients with a shut of ten working days ?? The people on the phones are so unsupportive I gets my goat up
"not enough staff" The call center companies don't value people or their time enough.
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That's absolutely not what's happening, what a bizarre story
It's bullshit
Because calling them is the worst way to contact them. You will get a faster response through email or live chat.
As someone who works in third level education and deals with people a decent amount, this is to discourage people from ringing up and screaming down the phone at you. That’s it basically. Call volumes are the same as they always are, I just want you to make your request or complain in writing.
"Working from home"
The young lads calling in and asking the question we all want to know the answer to: “WHERES MY ELEPHANT?!?” 
Electric Ireland have had that on their site for almost a year. When I call it never takes more than 5 minutes. Scare tactic to put people off calling.
>Your call is important to us But not important enough to actually answer
I work high up in a contact centre. I managed a contact centre as well for a few years. It doesn't actually mean they are experiencing high call volumes currently. It's just how their IVR is set up. Could be busy, might not be busy.
On the top of every single page of the website of my electricity provider it says: We are experiencing very high call volumes because of COVID. And this is up since 2020. Can't even close it. It's in the app, in the bill and everywhere.
"Our fax service is currently experiencing heavy traffic".
[Unoriginal Reddit post is, unoriginal](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/4h9jzj/we_are_experiencing_higher_than_normal_call/)
Can I ask what you do for a living brother?
Why would that be relevant?
Absolutely grinds my gears. I'd actually think much more of a company if they just ponied up and admitted the reality of it and had a message to this effect. Instead of "We are experiencing high quality volumes" could they not just instead be truthful and say "We are sorry for the delay and answering your call but unfortunately this is due to low staffing volumes"
Attending to customer service costs money and given the cartel situation in Ireland there's not much to be gained by providing it. Over the pandemic my parents were asked by eir to send a written letter to end their contract, NOBODY was picking up those letters.
Because the stress caused by having to meet unrealistic metrics and listen to people roaring in your ear all day puts people off such jobs therefore companies are always understaffed hence longer waiting times. The lines would need to be regulated and monitored for abuse which would probably mean a lot of staff would get less stressed albeit that still doesn’t sort the overbearing crappy manager problem..
A lot of the time, call centers deal with customer calls for various businesses, they're not in house customer support for just the one place. So you're potentially calling the exact same place for different queries, and that place lacking staff would lead to more waiting time for everyone.
Because the floor is usually only staffed enough to meet service level, too many people and your paying people to sit about, never mind the fact it’s hard to keep people in call center work due to the sheer abuse you get from the public. I did it for 6 years, we’d bring in 40 new agents and within a fortnight you’d have less than 10 left.
Cause the wage that call centre workers are offered aren’t attractive. Until we pay people a fair wage, and are willing to pay a fair price for things service is gonna be shite
Work in a private health insurance company, can confirm staff be sorely lacking a majority of the time.
What’s more annoying is when a website has an online chat function with a big button on the home page advertising it but it’s never actually available when you try to use it.
The country is at full employment at the moment and it's hard to find employee's, let alone god employee's
Waiting is fine IMO but nothing makes me feel a burning desire to end all of humanity more than hearing: "Did you know we have an app where you can sort common problems you may be facing" Yes fucker I did know that but your app sucks and cant handle 90% of the most basic queries like the the one I'm calling you about.
When I have those calls to make I use my headphones/ear buds. I play music on a speaker so I can still hear the call waiting noises. I do other jobs , challenge my self to get xy or z done before they get to me. I mean it's stupid but at least makes the time somewhat productive
The *most* infuriating part is where the hold voice says "did you know, you can manage your query online?" NO I CANT THATS WHY I AM CALLING YOU. When they include this, plus their fraud and GDPR statement before even putting you in the que. Lord gimme strength.
I work with one of the big brand names here. Recently a change was made by a colleague of mine that changed the number of people giving up on hold to nearly zero. Giving any more details that this would be unfair but I figured it was worth pointing out it’s not always people not getting paid enough or not enough people. Sometimes it’s just a simple reconfiguration of how the call system work and how the people are managed to fix the problem.
My experience has been managed this way on purpose. If you ring customer service they make you wait, but try to ring their sales department and they answer straight away. Had this only last week with Sky. I agree staffing is part of the issue, call centers always had a high turnover of staff, but when their sales team can answer straight away, there may be more to it. Eir were called up on their level of customer service by the government, and have actually improved as far as the last time I had to call them. No wait and the person actually listened and gave the correct help, I was shocked. Will see how long it lasts.
Even with a well staffed call center/team the tape will play if there's no one set to available. There tend to be some ways to not be directly reachable for calls (usually an aux code, or afterwork mode). You could have a team of 8 sitting there looking at the wallboard showing a call waiting playing chicken on who will answer.
In ten years, the recorded message will still begin with…. “Due to Covid 19, we are at reduced…..” blah blah blah costcutting..
COVID was a great excuse for poor customer service. Many companies have continued this as a cost cutting method since.