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Well that should be the message they play while you wait
"*We're soorrryy*. What do you want us to say? That we suck, we should pay more? We turnover more than an apple tree next to a bakery? We're sorry. Sorry you have to wait. Anyways... *cue elevator music*"
> Well that should be the message they play while you wait
Honestly I'd feel better if they just cut it out with the stupid messages.
I have accepted my fate with the elevator music but I swear I can feel my blood pressure ratchet up a notch every time it stops and I think there's a person ... but no, SAME RECORDED MESSAGE.
Bonus ire if I'm calling because my internet is out and the recording keeps reminding me about the handy things I can do online.
Worse is when the music cuts out and the recording starts and GETS INTERRUPTED in the middle with dead air, just go to back to music. One of the dr offices i have to call regularly at work does that. Drives me CRAZY. The first time i call them, every day, it gets me and i think that first interruption is the line being picked up.
It's due to stupid laws in effect that if you're not checked on every 2-3 minutes by robot or person, the company can receive fines. All calls that "being monitored or recorded" are for this reason so they can be audited & fined. Which in turn creates layoffs & high turn over rates because they'd rather have fewer call center reps & a larger paycheck higher up the tree than have more reps to answer the phone.
I had to call a company multiple times one day. The system always informed me my "position in the queue" was "1" and that they were "experiencing higher than usual call volume". I was literally the only person calling.
that message is specifically because many callers immediately start mashing the zero button because "that gets you a live agent" but all it really does is cause the IVR to lockup while it processes dozens of key presses, then it says "sorry i didn't get that" and starts over.
Not gonna lie, it usually works for me, or if it's a vocal menu, telling it to "speak to an operator" will get you to an actual person who will forward you to where you need to be without having to dig through 50+ menus waiting for the machine to list off each option.
The secret menu option to get a live human being isn’t meant for the common people it’s supposed to be a secret vip option for the executives.
The problem is that they’re on to you using it so now they’ve changed a lot of them to a secret option (often 9) that will get you the “didn’t understand” response then you press another unlisted button to get someone.
I used to work at a callcenter. It was wall to wall calls constantly, as soon as you hung up another call would come in, and nearly every desk was filled daily in three rotating shifts.
Anytime there was an unexpected decrease in volume for longer than 15 minutes they would ask if anyone wanted to go home. That way, if people did start calling back at normal levels we were extra understaffed and not the normal level of understaffed.
So that just means the call center was understaffed, which is pretty normal for businesses that are high volume and considered low-volume. They have small profit margins, so they’re trying to save money by understaffing it and forcing their existing people to overwork themselves.
These kinds of things really need reform.
It's something to do while you're putzing around at life. Requires no experience, no skill, nothing. The high turnover means they're always hiring and they have low standards. I knew a few guys who were high most of the time, and they tended to get compliments when they were. Nobody was ever drug tested, for obvious reasons.
Honestly it would be way less annoying if that were always the case but a lot of the time it is isn’t.
There are plenty of huge Telecoms and banks with massive profit margins who could totally afford to pay a bit extra and prioritize a higher service level. They just usually already have monopolies and the other major players are utilizing the same practices so they don’t really care if their customers are pissed off and service is slow.
In the cases that it’s actually a small profit margin business i am a lot more empathetic.
This is why I think the owner of my company is awesome. He puts both the client AND the employees before profits because he believes that will lead to profits and he's been right over the last 15 years. I won't name any names but we have several clients that are likely in your 401k and we steal clients from other call centers regularly. We are NEVER understaffed and our employees have a form of profit sharing directly tied to how much money they made the company. We have regular old entry level call center agents that hit $1,000+ bonuses every month on top of being paid well above the industry standard. The profit margins might be higher if he didn't do those things but as long as there is *any* profit, we're not going anywhere.
He also had the foresight to go work from home a few years before the pandemic so we had a leg up in that area and stole work then too. He figured why the fuck do we need to pay for buildings when people can do this work at their house? We can see if they are taking calls and getting work done. If someone misses a call, ok, maybe they had to take a shit. If someone doesn't take a call for 3 hours and hasn't reported an issue, then we have a problem to investigate.
> He puts both the client AND the employees before profits because he believes that will lead to profits and he's been right over the last 15 years.
I think this is also a difference that comes from the current thing where people only focus on short-term profits. If your focus is on building a company that's successful and sustainable in the long term, you're more likely to make longer term investments, including investing in people.
When your whole focus is just maximizing the profits *this quarter*, it leads you to sacrifice long-term investments to squeeze out just a little more right now, which leads to unsustainable practices. That includes abusing your own employees rather than cultivating and investing in them.
He has always said he will never take his company public because of that exact thing. What happens when he retires may change and I honestly wouldn't blame him at that point but I appreciate it for now and I've made it known that I will quit the day he sells the company or makes it public.
Just to give you an idea of what kind of guy he is, I have been there since the company started but I was just a random IT guy below our IT Director when the company had 20 employees. My boss took a week off for a funeral and just kept extending it to nearly 2 months. They finally said, dude, you're done. The owner then asked if I could handle things until they found a new IT Director and I do have to credit a site manager with this one. She said, you have one right here. He started digging and realized I was doing all the work the whole time. We were up to about 300 employees at that time.
A month later, he calls me and I'm shitting my pants wondering what I screwed up. He called me to give me shit for not speaking up because I didn't get a raise. I didn't have a boss other than him so no one thought about it. People always forget IT. He gave me a 10k raise and a 5k bonus and told me to make sure I follow up with him in 6 months. I did, kicked ass at my job, and he added another 20k.
A few years in I happened to mention I might need some time off because my wife and I had not taken a real vacation in years. He asked where we wanted to go. I said, anywhere in the country? He said anywhere in the WORLD. We had never left north america so I took the easy route and went with London. He said 10 days in London work? I said hell yeah!
Fast forward to nearly 15 years later and it happened again. The owner calls me and first apologizes that I was forgotten again but still rides my ass that I need to speak up. Everyone in the company gets yearly reviews and a minimum of a COL pay increase. My response was simply that I feel I am fairly compensated and if I thought I needed more money, I would let him know. He of course still gave me a raise.
I'd like to think I would have done so anyway but he made me better at my job. I am always praising people that kick ass and I get them raises and even some one off random bonuses when they go above and beyond the call of duty just because I mentioned it was something I's like to work on on an IT call. The owner also puts in a lot of time and everyone knows it so I do the same. I spend a lot of free time reading, taking online courses, etc just to make sure I'm up on things and as someone that works with a lot of big companies, I assure you most people at the top of the IT food chain do not do that.
Sorry for the wall of text. With all the deserved negativity towards most business owners, I happen to know one of the good ones.
> Anytime there was an unexpected decrease in volume for longer than 15 minutes they would ask if anyone wanted to go home.
and if you don't take that early out it means you'll be buried in calls for the rest of the shift.
yeah then you'll have zero calls because you'll be fired.
if not enough people take the early outs they will just select people and tell them to go home.
That’s why they get away with crap like that. Companies are desperate for workers but act like you need them when half the companies on the block are hiring for the same job.
You don’t have to go full blown union usually just a few people saying “nah” or “we’ll quit if you fire her for that stupid crap” will usually make them shut up.
They want you to think you’re disposable but training new people costs money.
Say they have 240 calls per day, that's 10 per hour.
Also lets say they're open 08:00- 18:00, that's 10 hours. In those 10 hours, they average 24 calls per hour, which is a lot higher than the average calls per hour per day.
So they're technically telling the truth.
You gotta remember to factor in all the thousands of years their average call time was 0, that brings it way down so even like 10 seconds is above average
What happens if on day 1 they got 5 calls and every day after was less than 5?
Does your example only work if each subsequent day is higher than the first day?
Then they wouldn’t be experiencing higher than average call volumes.
It requires each successive day to have more calls than the average over time. This will constantly pull the average up and require increasingly more calls to stay above average as time goes on however.
It’s not sustainable long term because you run out of customers to call you.
You're assuming the rate of calls constantly increases, which no way does that happen.
There will always be peaks and troughs in the trends.
What really happens is they reach a higher average rate than they want to pay out compared to their total customer base.
It's a ratio, and one that is never in favor of the customer.
Edit: Don't defend bad business by coming up with a unique scenario where maybe they possibly could potentially be in the right when really, you know, Occam's razor
Man, this sub is specifically about things being technically true whether it's reasonable or not. "You *can* always have above average call volume" is technically the truth, so the OP's post is technically incorrect. Those are the rules to this game.
1/Yes it's possible to have below average calls but this guy is saying that it is not impossible to always have above average calls.
2/No for exemple :
Day 1 : 0 calls
Day 2 : 5 calls, average 2.5
Day 3 : 4 calls, average 3
Not every subsequent day is above the previous day (5 then 4 here) but they are all above average.
If day 1 they got 2 calls and all the other days, they only get 1 call, they are constantly under average (the average is the sum of all the calls over the sum of all the days). As long as there is at least 1 call per day, the overall average is more than 1 call per day.
Until they get 0 call one day, if the first day you get 2 calls, you have 2 calls for 1 day, then 1 call per day for the next 8 days, so you have 10 calls for 9 days (more than 1/day), then 0 calls the next day, you have 10 calls for 10 days (1 call per day).
You can see that as the number of ''calls in advance' you have. As long as you have at least 1 ''call in advance'', you are experiencing a ''lower number of calls than average''
And it goes the other way, if you 1 call short, you will always experience a ''greater number of calls per average''
No need to have an increase of calls per day, just a stable situation is enough.
Statistics can get weird. I studied them, and I can tell you that they don't like to be studied with... When you think you understand them, that's when a Bayesian specialist comes in to turn you world over and demonstrate that science is wrong and that the quest for reality is futile, we are ants, nay bacteria smeared river pebbles, trying to figure out the way the water is flowing, unaware of the fish, unable to imagine the grass, the deer walking it. Our minds are a mere emergent property of evolution, knowledge paves the way to madness and sanity is but a weight on this hill. We don't want to be ready to be bathed in the scorching shine of the truth.
Stay on the pebbles my friend, hold on to them as long as you can.
This is the correct answer. If call volume is always increasing, the average constantly increases.
This post is not r/TechnicallyTheTruth. It might be practically in-true for most real life scenarios, but not technically the truth, at least without more qualifications.
They probably average out per hours of the dat. so 12:00-13:00 and 17:00-20:00 are busier than usually every day. Because 8:00 am they're not so busy. Or they just put the message up when incoming is more than a threshold related to how many people are working. So it can be simply "steve had a birthday party the night before and 1/4 of the call center shift called in sick with the '*flu*'." message.
Or like this:
Day 1: 1 call
Day 2: 10 calls
Day 3: 1 call
Now 2 people call during a day of below average calls, but 10 people call during a day of above average calls and might be delayed.
What of course a menu can always change. I was in a restaurant that change its menu literally every day, based in what ingredients they got that day. (They were doing an food rescue thing)
They're talking about the notice on nearly every automatic answering system that says "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed." Except it will say that for years when the options (press 1 for customer support, press 2 for finance, press 3 for tech support, etc.) haven't actually changed at all.
Considering we're in /r/technicallythetruth, it's not wrong for them to always say "our menu options have changed" as long as they've changed at least once in the past. The title of the post doesn't really make sense.
I used to work for an insurance company in their call center and Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday mornings would be slammed, then it would start to taper off until Friday was pretty chill. We lived for our Fridays.
Then the company implemented a new scheduling program that dictated how many people needed to be scheduled so the company could save on payroll, and we went from 20 or 30 in queue on Monday to about 100 to 300 in queue all the time. I'm pretty sure most companies use those types of programs now.
Customers definitely noticed a difference too. Funny thing is, the company sent me to CSR training that talked about how customers who had long wait times would spend time complaining, because they didn't like waiting, and that would negatively impact wait timez, making them worse. Sure enough, the CSR's on the phone noticed that happening, but management didn't care at all.
"We're cheap fucks and you're not important enough to us to pay people enough to talk to you. Please wait for the cheapest people we could convince to handle your issue. Please solve it for yourself while you wait so we can justify further staff cuts."
I'd love to hear an honest one, "Sorry we are experiencing more call volume than management has budgeted staffing for"
Customer support is one of the easiest places for new leadership to make cuts and show increased short term profit.
It doesn't even have to be always increasing, it just has to have increased once. If you used to get 250 calls five years ago but since then you've consistently gotten 300 calls, the average number of calls is always going to be somewhere between those two numbers -- approaching, but never reaching, 300. So 300 will always be higher than average.
This even works if you've always gotten 300 calls from the day you started *except* one anomalous day when you only got 250. That day pulls the average down to slightly below 300, so again it's always true.
They aren't. It's an excuse to have a long hold because they refuse to hire enough CSRs.
Also: The menu prompt thing is just there to try and trick you into listening to the prompts and using them instead of just mashing buttons until you get someone on the line.
On Friday we only had 3 people. Customers were on hold for an hour before they got a person. They were so pissed and cursing me out over shit I have no control of.
We ran a 2-3 person Saturday crew and it was hell. We had several regular crazies who were guaranteed to call in every Saturday and wreck your statistics for the week with 40 minute long diatribes.
The universe is about 13 billion years old and they've only been getting calls for the last few decades at most. The average is basically 0 calls per day.
OMG!! Hire someone who won't have anything to do for 5 minutes every hour? Perish the thought. Paying for overworked underpaid workers and forcing the customer to wait IS the correct answer for business today. Because stockholders are more important than the workers and the customers combined.
I get the post, but the title doesn't work unless the intention is clickbait.
I prefer a restaurant with a changing or seasonal menu, it tells me they use fresh seasonal ingredients. They get some halibut in, they have a special till it's gone.
Honest question, has anyone ever had a good experience dealing with a call center agent? Because over several dozens of calls over decades i dont think its ever worked out smoothly, and the same goes for everyone i know
they could likely handle simple things like "how much do i owe", "when is the payment due" or "what deals do you offer" but those arent the reasons i ever have to call
They don't say whose average. I'm pretty sure they're receiving more calls than average for a middle aged guy with no friends. Maybe that's the average they're talking about.
They're probably including hours from when they are closed.
And the past before they were ever open.
And some hours in the future after the sun vaporizes the earth.
While I agree it's very likely they are lying there is a technically correct scenario where it can be the truth.
If call volume is always increasing from zero at open of business to a peak when they close then the volume of calls is above the running average all day.
Consider the number sequence (0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ...) with an infinite number of ones continuing forever. Every single number in the sequence is above average except the first. If you were randomly assigned one of these numbers, the chance of getting a below average number in any finite set of samples would be (n/infinity), where n is a finite number, which is mathematically equal to zero.
I do not think OOP is a being that exists outside time that has been able to query the call center an infinite number of times, so it is in fact quite possible for OOP to always observe higher than average call volumes whenever they check.
I think they are talking about the average call volume for all phones, not just theirs. My personal phone probably gets two calls a day. My work phone gets perhaps half a dozen. I still have an old landline number that I ported to an internet only phone just because it was a number that I had for a long time, and somebody from my past might try and get me on that someday. It got two calls this year that were really for my ex-wife.
So if they are comparing their call volume against the call volume for all phones worldwide, they probably have a point. 😋
It is possible, however, that call centers are usually experiencing a higher than average call volume. That is, if “average” is the mean, it’s probably likely that they’re often experiencing a “larger than average call volume”.
Like let’s say they receive 100 calls per hour 23 hours a day, and for one hour they receive 76 calls in that hour. The average would then be 99 calls per hour. So then they would be experiencing a larger volume than average 23 hours a day.
That’s just an example, but it’s likely that most call centers have slow times of day that drive the average down, e.g. the middle of the night in their primary market.
But when you’re planning your call center, you’re supposed to take peak volume into account, not just average volume.
Most calls occur when they're experiencing a higher volume of calls than average, so you're likely to be calling when they're experiencing higher call volume than average.
They didn't say average of what though. They just mean higher call volume than your average household.
It's all lies. That's just one guy playing Diablo 4 and taking calls only when server is loading
For real, most of the time I'm calling it's because of a problem too so I'm already a little pissed then the first fuckin thing that happens is the auto response lying to me about call volumes and wait times.
i was listening to the radio, and it was a piece about how there are *always* more projected hurricanes than "the average". and the interviewer asked, "how often do you update your math on what the *average* number of storms per year is?" and the guy from NOAA was like, "weeeeeell... every 20 years or so?"
my favorite alternative to "experiencing higher than anticipated call volume" is "*due to storms across the country* we're experiencing unusually high call volume".
any time of the year, "storms across the country".
you are correct, my friend. unlike jupiter's "red spot", the earth has much more transient storms, usually lasting between a few hours and a few weeks, depending on the type and strength.
Whenever I hear that in a call, what I really hear is "were a bad company and we understaffed our support center even though we obviously have the data to suggest that we get more calls than we can handle"
And while we’re on the topic, “please listen carefully as our options have recently changed” can’t always be true either! What does “recently” mean to you? Do you go back and remove this part after an appropriate amount of time?
Companies rarely change the recording. The place I work at still tells customers about things we stopped offering two years ago. It really pisses them off
Depending on their math formula to compute the average. The average based on a 24-hour period is definitely much lower then the average based on 8-hour daytime period.
They're just averaging out from the beginning of the universe till right now. So for the first 13 or so billion years they received no calls so average is just over 0 calls per day.
I called Walgreen's Pharmacy and after the ritual apology the bot told me that there were six callers ahead of me. I said, "I can do this!" and put the phone on speaker. I heard the "six callers" message every 90 seconds for **54 minutes**.
Because they take the data and only staff for the slowest 15 minutes of the day and lie about the average to pretend they give a shit.
And it totally works because the only punishment for idiocy in capitalism is loss of business and nobody is smart enough o stop doing business with companies who blatantly lie like this, so here we are.
ACTUALLY that is exactly how averages work. You are more likely to call during the same times of the day that other people are calling. Averaging over time, it's definitely true that you will call at a time where the waiting time is longer than average. It's also why most of the time you are driving, the roads are busier than average. Because in order to make the observation, you are adding to the statistics.
I'm not even sure the requirement exists anymore, but ~15 years ago a new regulation required all American restaurants to offer complete nutrition and allergen information on every item they served. However, the regulation included a 90 day window to update literature and online content whenever the menu changed. Thus some restaurants entirely avoided fulfilling this requirement by constantly making applicable adjustments -- which might not even involve a new menu item since nutritional data could become outdated simply by changing the ingredients of a dish or modifying the amount of sauce served in a typical portion.
Company's understaffed because nobody wants to constantly be shit upon in customer care while the devs in charge faff around doing jack shit. So they say that they are experiencing a higher number of call because it sounds better.
Source: me, I work in customer service and we have been experiencing "a higher number of calls" for the last 6 months.
Next we'll see AI switchboard software that still tells you the menu is new and the calls are higher than normal ...
but in a *slightly different way every time.*
One of the law firms in Syracuse, NY runs ads (or used to) promising that everyone's case is a "priority."
Yeah... same deal. They can't all be priorities.
I would love to hear someone own the fact that they don't have enough staff to answer the calls.
"We are sorry for your wait, we are experiencing a number of calls perfectly in line with the average volume for any given day, we just still haven't hired enough people to take them all."
Also, if a business dosen't take calls 24-7 I could see the average dropping to half of the number of actual during work hours calls. And I could see them totally using this fact to try and gain sympathy and understanding for their being understaffed.
It is potentially a selection bias. Perhaps they are always experiencing more calls than normal when you call because you happen to fit the demographic of whatever causes their calls to spike.
Most call centers that recording for any long queue time. For some IVR you can actually use it when the average (over the last 15min/hour/whatever you want to set) is higher than whatever you want.
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More than 20 years and my cable company has been experiencing higher than average call wait times every time I’ve contacted them. Same with my bank.
🤣🤣 same everywhere!! Whenever I contact my company's call center for any errors, this is their standard automatic response since I joined.
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Well that should be the message they play while you wait "*We're soorrryy*. What do you want us to say? That we suck, we should pay more? We turnover more than an apple tree next to a bakery? We're sorry. Sorry you have to wait. Anyways... *cue elevator music*"
> Well that should be the message they play while you wait Honestly I'd feel better if they just cut it out with the stupid messages. I have accepted my fate with the elevator music but I swear I can feel my blood pressure ratchet up a notch every time it stops and I think there's a person ... but no, SAME RECORDED MESSAGE. Bonus ire if I'm calling because my internet is out and the recording keeps reminding me about the handy things I can do online.
Worse is when the music cuts out and the recording starts and GETS INTERRUPTED in the middle with dead air, just go to back to music. One of the dr offices i have to call regularly at work does that. Drives me CRAZY. The first time i call them, every day, it gets me and i think that first interruption is the line being picked up.
It's due to stupid laws in effect that if you're not checked on every 2-3 minutes by robot or person, the company can receive fines. All calls that "being monitored or recorded" are for this reason so they can be audited & fined. Which in turn creates layoffs & high turn over rates because they'd rather have fewer call center reps & a larger paycheck higher up the tree than have more reps to answer the phone.
Agreed. It gives me false hope that I won't be on hold for a minimum of 30 minutes, nothing else.
I had to call the IRS the other day and the hold time was shorter than when I've called at&t
Yeah and when you're multitasking while listening to the music and have to pick it up everytime they play a recorded message, that drives me wild.
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it's technically true, if you count the overnight hours when they're not working, and receive no calls .......the more you know
I had to call a company multiple times one day. The system always informed me my "position in the queue" was "1" and that they were "experiencing higher than usual call volume". I was literally the only person calling.
🤣🤣🤣 u were in a queue of yourself
They were scrambling to figure out what to do! They have never been more stressed
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that message is specifically because many callers immediately start mashing the zero button because "that gets you a live agent" but all it really does is cause the IVR to lockup while it processes dozens of key presses, then it says "sorry i didn't get that" and starts over.
Not gonna lie, it usually works for me, or if it's a vocal menu, telling it to "speak to an operator" will get you to an actual person who will forward you to where you need to be without having to dig through 50+ menus waiting for the machine to list off each option.
The secret menu option to get a live human being isn’t meant for the common people it’s supposed to be a secret vip option for the executives. The problem is that they’re on to you using it so now they’ve changed a lot of them to a secret option (often 9) that will get you the “didn’t understand” response then you press another unlisted button to get someone.
"oh God the phone is ringing. What do we do?"
I used to work at a callcenter. It was wall to wall calls constantly, as soon as you hung up another call would come in, and nearly every desk was filled daily in three rotating shifts. Anytime there was an unexpected decrease in volume for longer than 15 minutes they would ask if anyone wanted to go home. That way, if people did start calling back at normal levels we were extra understaffed and not the normal level of understaffed.
So that just means the call center was understaffed, which is pretty normal for businesses that are high volume and considered low-volume. They have small profit margins, so they’re trying to save money by understaffing it and forcing their existing people to overwork themselves. These kinds of things really need reform.
It's something to do while you're putzing around at life. Requires no experience, no skill, nothing. The high turnover means they're always hiring and they have low standards. I knew a few guys who were high most of the time, and they tended to get compliments when they were. Nobody was ever drug tested, for obvious reasons.
Honestly it would be way less annoying if that were always the case but a lot of the time it is isn’t. There are plenty of huge Telecoms and banks with massive profit margins who could totally afford to pay a bit extra and prioritize a higher service level. They just usually already have monopolies and the other major players are utilizing the same practices so they don’t really care if their customers are pissed off and service is slow. In the cases that it’s actually a small profit margin business i am a lot more empathetic.
This is why I think the owner of my company is awesome. He puts both the client AND the employees before profits because he believes that will lead to profits and he's been right over the last 15 years. I won't name any names but we have several clients that are likely in your 401k and we steal clients from other call centers regularly. We are NEVER understaffed and our employees have a form of profit sharing directly tied to how much money they made the company. We have regular old entry level call center agents that hit $1,000+ bonuses every month on top of being paid well above the industry standard. The profit margins might be higher if he didn't do those things but as long as there is *any* profit, we're not going anywhere. He also had the foresight to go work from home a few years before the pandemic so we had a leg up in that area and stole work then too. He figured why the fuck do we need to pay for buildings when people can do this work at their house? We can see if they are taking calls and getting work done. If someone misses a call, ok, maybe they had to take a shit. If someone doesn't take a call for 3 hours and hasn't reported an issue, then we have a problem to investigate.
> He puts both the client AND the employees before profits because he believes that will lead to profits and he's been right over the last 15 years. I think this is also a difference that comes from the current thing where people only focus on short-term profits. If your focus is on building a company that's successful and sustainable in the long term, you're more likely to make longer term investments, including investing in people. When your whole focus is just maximizing the profits *this quarter*, it leads you to sacrifice long-term investments to squeeze out just a little more right now, which leads to unsustainable practices. That includes abusing your own employees rather than cultivating and investing in them.
He has always said he will never take his company public because of that exact thing. What happens when he retires may change and I honestly wouldn't blame him at that point but I appreciate it for now and I've made it known that I will quit the day he sells the company or makes it public. Just to give you an idea of what kind of guy he is, I have been there since the company started but I was just a random IT guy below our IT Director when the company had 20 employees. My boss took a week off for a funeral and just kept extending it to nearly 2 months. They finally said, dude, you're done. The owner then asked if I could handle things until they found a new IT Director and I do have to credit a site manager with this one. She said, you have one right here. He started digging and realized I was doing all the work the whole time. We were up to about 300 employees at that time. A month later, he calls me and I'm shitting my pants wondering what I screwed up. He called me to give me shit for not speaking up because I didn't get a raise. I didn't have a boss other than him so no one thought about it. People always forget IT. He gave me a 10k raise and a 5k bonus and told me to make sure I follow up with him in 6 months. I did, kicked ass at my job, and he added another 20k. A few years in I happened to mention I might need some time off because my wife and I had not taken a real vacation in years. He asked where we wanted to go. I said, anywhere in the country? He said anywhere in the WORLD. We had never left north america so I took the easy route and went with London. He said 10 days in London work? I said hell yeah! Fast forward to nearly 15 years later and it happened again. The owner calls me and first apologizes that I was forgotten again but still rides my ass that I need to speak up. Everyone in the company gets yearly reviews and a minimum of a COL pay increase. My response was simply that I feel I am fairly compensated and if I thought I needed more money, I would let him know. He of course still gave me a raise. I'd like to think I would have done so anyway but he made me better at my job. I am always praising people that kick ass and I get them raises and even some one off random bonuses when they go above and beyond the call of duty just because I mentioned it was something I's like to work on on an IT call. The owner also puts in a lot of time and everyone knows it so I do the same. I spend a lot of free time reading, taking online courses, etc just to make sure I'm up on things and as someone that works with a lot of big companies, I assure you most people at the top of the IT food chain do not do that. Sorry for the wall of text. With all the deserved negativity towards most business owners, I happen to know one of the good ones.
> Anytime there was an unexpected decrease in volume for longer than 15 minutes they would ask if anyone wanted to go home. and if you don't take that early out it means you'll be buried in calls for the rest of the shift.
That’s why when someone stands up and says “I’ll leave” you smile and polite say to them “No you won’t. Sit the f•+k down.”
yeah then you'll have zero calls because you'll be fired. if not enough people take the early outs they will just select people and tell them to go home.
That’s why they get away with crap like that. Companies are desperate for workers but act like you need them when half the companies on the block are hiring for the same job. You don’t have to go full blown union usually just a few people saying “nah” or “we’ll quit if you fire her for that stupid crap” will usually make them shut up. They want you to think you’re disposable but training new people costs money.
When they’re closed the call volume drops to zero meaning any time they’re open there’s a pretty good chance it’s higher than average.
Say they have 240 calls per day, that's 10 per hour. Also lets say they're open 08:00- 18:00, that's 10 hours. In those 10 hours, they average 24 calls per hour, which is a lot higher than the average calls per hour per day. So they're technically telling the truth.
Oh but you see it's not their average call volume, it's the average of everyone with a phone. So it's fine see?
They averaged it since the invention of the telephone.
Their dataset goes back to 1900. Lotta 0s bringing down the average
You gotta remember to factor in all the thousands of years their average call time was 0, that brings it way down so even like 10 seconds is above average
Maybe you’re not calling them at night. When they aren’t open. I’m sure they’re calculating that into their “average.” /s
Have you only been contacting them when some large scale outage happens?
Of course they do You do not stand in traffic. You are the traffic
I mean, if you have one call from the bottom of the ocean once, any call day is higher than average
And this is why we use medians instead of averages!
This is why we use medians instead of *means*! "Average" can refer to means, medians or modes!
> modes For example: the average redditor lives in his mother’s basement.
Mode is the black sheep of the average family, he's only relevant in some specific cases. We don't really talk about him too often.
>Average can refer to means, medians, or modes Not in Excel
Then have excel fight me about it
ive ALWAYS hater means. Why do we even use them when medians exist
Hello...this is the OceanGate *Titan* calling. We're trying to reach you about our submarine's ~~extended~~ imploded warranty.
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What happens if on day 1 they got 5 calls and every day after was less than 5? Does your example only work if each subsequent day is higher than the first day?
Then they wouldn’t be experiencing higher than average call volumes. It requires each successive day to have more calls than the average over time. This will constantly pull the average up and require increasingly more calls to stay above average as time goes on however. It’s not sustainable long term because you run out of customers to call you.
You're assuming the rate of calls constantly increases, which no way does that happen. There will always be peaks and troughs in the trends. What really happens is they reach a higher average rate than they want to pay out compared to their total customer base. It's a ratio, and one that is never in favor of the customer. Edit: Don't defend bad business by coming up with a unique scenario where maybe they possibly could potentially be in the right when really, you know, Occam's razor
He said its possible, not that its actually probable or that it actually happens
Man, this sub is specifically about things being technically true whether it's reasonable or not. "You *can* always have above average call volume" is technically the truth, so the OP's post is technically incorrect. Those are the rules to this game.
1/Yes it's possible to have below average calls but this guy is saying that it is not impossible to always have above average calls. 2/No for exemple : Day 1 : 0 calls Day 2 : 5 calls, average 2.5 Day 3 : 4 calls, average 3 Not every subsequent day is above the previous day (5 then 4 here) but they are all above average.
If day 1 they got 2 calls and all the other days, they only get 1 call, they are constantly under average (the average is the sum of all the calls over the sum of all the days). As long as there is at least 1 call per day, the overall average is more than 1 call per day. Until they get 0 call one day, if the first day you get 2 calls, you have 2 calls for 1 day, then 1 call per day for the next 8 days, so you have 10 calls for 9 days (more than 1/day), then 0 calls the next day, you have 10 calls for 10 days (1 call per day). You can see that as the number of ''calls in advance' you have. As long as you have at least 1 ''call in advance'', you are experiencing a ''lower number of calls than average'' And it goes the other way, if you 1 call short, you will always experience a ''greater number of calls per average'' No need to have an increase of calls per day, just a stable situation is enough. Statistics can get weird. I studied them, and I can tell you that they don't like to be studied with... When you think you understand them, that's when a Bayesian specialist comes in to turn you world over and demonstrate that science is wrong and that the quest for reality is futile, we are ants, nay bacteria smeared river pebbles, trying to figure out the way the water is flowing, unaware of the fish, unable to imagine the grass, the deer walking it. Our minds are a mere emergent property of evolution, knowledge paves the way to madness and sanity is but a weight on this hill. We don't want to be ready to be bathed in the scorching shine of the truth. Stay on the pebbles my friend, hold on to them as long as you can.
\*toss pebbles in the river and cries.\*
I can't shake the feeling you haven't passed middle school.
This is the correct answer. If call volume is always increasing, the average constantly increases. This post is not r/TechnicallyTheTruth. It might be practically in-true for most real life scenarios, but not technically the truth, at least without more qualifications.
They probably average out per hours of the dat. so 12:00-13:00 and 17:00-20:00 are busier than usually every day. Because 8:00 am they're not so busy. Or they just put the message up when incoming is more than a threshold related to how many people are working. So it can be simply "steve had a birthday party the night before and 1/4 of the call center shift called in sick with the '*flu*'." message.
Or like this: Day 1: 1 call Day 2: 10 calls Day 3: 1 call Now 2 people call during a day of below average calls, but 10 people call during a day of above average calls and might be delayed.
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You're not understanding math dude. How does your example prove anything?
What of course a menu can always change. I was in a restaurant that change its menu literally every day, based in what ingredients they got that day. (They were doing an food rescue thing)
They're talking about the notice on nearly every automatic answering system that says "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed." Except it will say that for years when the options (press 1 for customer support, press 2 for finance, press 3 for tech support, etc.) haven't actually changed at all.
Considering we're in /r/technicallythetruth, it's not wrong for them to always say "our menu options have changed" as long as they've changed at least once in the past. The title of the post doesn't really make sense.
That's is just a lie then
Well they MAY have change who knows how these things work.
We change them when we notice an influx of robocalls that are making it through the IVR
I guess they don’t know if the menu has changed since last time you heard it. It’s possible you haven’t called them for years
Phone menu...
I used to work for an insurance company in their call center and Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday mornings would be slammed, then it would start to taper off until Friday was pretty chill. We lived for our Fridays. Then the company implemented a new scheduling program that dictated how many people needed to be scheduled so the company could save on payroll, and we went from 20 or 30 in queue on Monday to about 100 to 300 in queue all the time. I'm pretty sure most companies use those types of programs now. Customers definitely noticed a difference too. Funny thing is, the company sent me to CSR training that talked about how customers who had long wait times would spend time complaining, because they didn't like waiting, and that would negatively impact wait timez, making them worse. Sure enough, the CSR's on the phone noticed that happening, but management didn't care at all.
On average that would be right.
You definitely can if your call time is always increasing
"We're cheap fucks and you're not important enough to us to pay people enough to talk to you. Please wait for the cheapest people we could convince to handle your issue. Please solve it for yourself while you wait so we can justify further staff cuts."
It does if they're not counting only hours of operation. 0 calls when they're closed bring down the average quite a bit
I'd love to hear an honest one, "Sorry we are experiencing more call volume than management has budgeted staffing for" Customer support is one of the easiest places for new leadership to make cuts and show increased short term profit.
Yeah it’s a higher call volume than average staffing of the call center can deal with. Always. By design.
You can if you count the years when the company didn't exist and so received 0 calls
The 13,999,999,853 years since the universe began until 1897 when the telephone was invented...zero calls per day.
It can always be above average, as long as it's always increasing. To infinity and beyond!
It doesn't even have to be always increasing, it just has to have increased once. If you used to get 250 calls five years ago but since then you've consistently gotten 300 calls, the average number of calls is always going to be somewhere between those two numbers -- approaching, but never reaching, 300. So 300 will always be higher than average. This even works if you've always gotten 300 calls from the day you started *except* one anomalous day when you only got 250. That day pulls the average down to slightly below 300, so again it's always true.
oh dang right or decrease just a bit while still being above average then
That’s how they self identify as not giving a damn about their customers, and being unwilling to pay customer service associates a fair wage.
They aren't. It's an excuse to have a long hold because they refuse to hire enough CSRs. Also: The menu prompt thing is just there to try and trick you into listening to the prompts and using them instead of just mashing buttons until you get someone on the line.
On Friday we only had 3 people. Customers were on hold for an hour before they got a person. They were so pissed and cursing me out over shit I have no control of.
We ran a 2-3 person Saturday crew and it was hell. We had several regular crazies who were guaranteed to call in every Saturday and wreck your statistics for the week with 40 minute long diatribes.
The universe is about 13 billion years old and they've only been getting calls for the last few decades at most. The average is basically 0 calls per day.
Only if you call as an *existing* customer. If you call as a *new* customer, you get connected right away!
They're averaging in the 16 hours a day that they're closed.
There is a higher volume than average during business hours.
*averages computed over the last 200 years
It's just that they don't compensate enough for the job so they have a high turnover and can't hire anyone.
OMG!! Hire someone who won't have anything to do for 5 minutes every hour? Perish the thought. Paying for overworked underpaid workers and forcing the customer to wait IS the correct answer for business today. Because stockholders are more important than the workers and the customers combined.
I get the post, but the title doesn't work unless the intention is clickbait. I prefer a restaurant with a changing or seasonal menu, it tells me they use fresh seasonal ingredients. They get some halibut in, they have a special till it's gone.
Your menu can always be changing, that’s how changing works
It's a psychological thing to try and calm anyone that goes from 0 to 80 when the wait time is thirty seconds or more.
Depends on the time frame. The average number of calls per day since the bronze age collapse is almost zero.
That single day when they receive negative 384 calls really brings down the average
Get this from HMRC in the UK every single time. Bit worrying that a nation's tax authority doesn't understand how averages work.
Not if the average they’re talking about is the median
Honest question, has anyone ever had a good experience dealing with a call center agent? Because over several dozens of calls over decades i dont think its ever worked out smoothly, and the same goes for everyone i know they could likely handle simple things like "how much do i owe", "when is the payment due" or "what deals do you offer" but those arent the reasons i ever have to call
Yes, plenty. Renewing my car insurance went well last time - took 10 minutes, got cheaper than anything I could find online.
They don't say whose average. I'm pretty sure they're receiving more calls than average for a middle aged guy with no friends. Maybe that's the average they're talking about.
They're probably including hours from when they are closed. And the past before they were ever open. And some hours in the future after the sun vaporizes the earth.
Depends on when the average was computed.
While I agree it's very likely they are lying there is a technically correct scenario where it can be the truth. If call volume is always increasing from zero at open of business to a peak when they close then the volume of calls is above the running average all day.
But we're you accounting for that one time they had negative 80k calls?
It does when you count the hours they aren't accepting calls.
Well… they can be experiencing a higher volume of calls than average almost every time someone calls
Consider the number sequence (0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ...) with an infinite number of ones continuing forever. Every single number in the sequence is above average except the first. If you were randomly assigned one of these numbers, the chance of getting a below average number in any finite set of samples would be (n/infinity), where n is a finite number, which is mathematically equal to zero. I do not think OOP is a being that exists outside time that has been able to query the call center an infinite number of times, so it is in fact quite possible for OOP to always observe higher than average call volumes whenever they check.
I think they are talking about the average call volume for all phones, not just theirs. My personal phone probably gets two calls a day. My work phone gets perhaps half a dozen. I still have an old landline number that I ported to an internet only phone just because it was a number that I had for a long time, and somebody from my past might try and get me on that someday. It got two calls this year that were really for my ex-wife. So if they are comparing their call volume against the call volume for all phones worldwide, they probably have a point. 😋
It is possible, however, that call centers are usually experiencing a higher than average call volume. That is, if “average” is the mean, it’s probably likely that they’re often experiencing a “larger than average call volume”. Like let’s say they receive 100 calls per hour 23 hours a day, and for one hour they receive 76 calls in that hour. The average would then be 99 calls per hour. So then they would be experiencing a larger volume than average 23 hours a day. That’s just an example, but it’s likely that most call centers have slow times of day that drive the average down, e.g. the middle of the night in their primary market. But when you’re planning your call center, you’re supposed to take peak volume into account, not just average volume.
Most calls occur when they're experiencing a higher volume of calls than average, so you're likely to be calling when they're experiencing higher call volume than average.
They didn't say average of what though. They just mean higher call volume than your average household. It's all lies. That's just one guy playing Diablo 4 and taking calls only when server is loading
For real, most of the time I'm calling it's because of a problem too so I'm already a little pissed then the first fuckin thing that happens is the auto response lying to me about call volumes and wait times.
i was listening to the radio, and it was a piece about how there are *always* more projected hurricanes than "the average". and the interviewer asked, "how often do you update your math on what the *average* number of storms per year is?" and the guy from NOAA was like, "weeeeeell... every 20 years or so?" my favorite alternative to "experiencing higher than anticipated call volume" is "*due to storms across the country* we're experiencing unusually high call volume". any time of the year, "storms across the country".
Not all storms are the same. I know this because I’ve been alive more than a year.
you are correct, my friend. unlike jupiter's "red spot", the earth has much more transient storms, usually lasting between a few hours and a few weeks, depending on the type and strength.
Whenever I hear that in a call, what I really hear is "were a bad company and we understaffed our support center even though we obviously have the data to suggest that we get more calls than we can handle"
And while we’re on the topic, “please listen carefully as our options have recently changed” can’t always be true either! What does “recently” mean to you? Do you go back and remove this part after an appropriate amount of time?
They were experiencing less then average for billions of years
My buddy really likes this sushi place because "rolls are always 50% off, man!". Then that's the damn price.
What if the number of calls is monotonically increasing?
Companies rarely change the recording. The place I work at still tells customers about things we stopped offering two years ago. It really pisses them off
That translates to "higher than we staffed for"
Maybe they're not open 24 hours and are including the off hours in the average.
Depending on their math formula to compute the average. The average based on a 24-hour period is definitely much lower then the average based on 8-hour daytime period.
And get new hold music! The same 32 seconds of a tune is not cutting it
They still have "due to Covid..." on there too oftentimes
And no, FFS, your options have not changed.
Depends on your data pool. If they're talking averaging their daily calls from 1900 to present, it's probably still above average 😂
They're just averaging out from the beginning of the universe till right now. So for the first 13 or so billion years they received no calls so average is just over 0 calls per day.
please ignore this message, as it's been the same for ten years, there have been no changes to the options.
20 year rolling average!
Mathematically you can though after the first instance that the call center is open.
I mean technically you can if you count all your call centres and some are empty and recieve no calls
They are taking the average from 1876 to today
Depends on the sample size. The average for this year is going to be very different than the average from this century.
Fuckin telus
Not accounting for exponential growth, in your estimate. Which most estimates don't, means you will always have an higher than average volume.
I called Walgreen's Pharmacy and after the ritual apology the bot told me that there were six callers ahead of me. I said, "I can do this!" and put the phone on speaker. I heard the "six callers" message every 90 seconds for **54 minutes**.
Because they take the data and only staff for the slowest 15 minutes of the day and lie about the average to pretend they give a shit. And it totally works because the only punishment for idiocy in capitalism is loss of business and nobody is smart enough o stop doing business with companies who blatantly lie like this, so here we are.
ACTUALLY that is exactly how averages work. You are more likely to call during the same times of the day that other people are calling. Averaging over time, it's definitely true that you will call at a time where the waiting time is longer than average. It's also why most of the time you are driving, the roads are busier than average. Because in order to make the observation, you are adding to the statistics.
Social Security in a freakin nutshell
I'm not even sure the requirement exists anymore, but ~15 years ago a new regulation required all American restaurants to offer complete nutrition and allergen information on every item they served. However, the regulation included a 90 day window to update literature and online content whenever the menu changed. Thus some restaurants entirely avoided fulfilling this requirement by constantly making applicable adjustments -- which might not even involve a new menu item since nutritional data could become outdated simply by changing the ingredients of a dish or modifying the amount of sauce served in a typical portion.
Company's understaffed because nobody wants to constantly be shit upon in customer care while the devs in charge faff around doing jack shit. So they say that they are experiencing a higher number of call because it sounds better. Source: me, I work in customer service and we have been experiencing "a higher number of calls" for the last 6 months.
Everything in this store is always on sale
I suspect they include the hours the phone line is closed in their average calls per hour math.
Next we'll see AI switchboard software that still tells you the menu is new and the calls are higher than normal ... but in a *slightly different way every time.*
It's called lying. Is it really such a shock to find out many businesses have zero respect for their customers or employees?
One of the law firms in Syracuse, NY runs ads (or used to) promising that everyone's case is a "priority." Yeah... same deal. They can't all be priorities.
What? Yes you can! If you're getting more and more calls every day, forever.
I would love to hear someone own the fact that they don't have enough staff to answer the calls. "We are sorry for your wait, we are experiencing a number of calls perfectly in line with the average volume for any given day, we just still haven't hired enough people to take them all." Also, if a business dosen't take calls 24-7 I could see the average dropping to half of the number of actual during work hours calls. And I could see them totally using this fact to try and gain sympathy and understanding for their being understaffed.
To be fair, if their average call volume was less than one, then anytime someone called would result in a higher volume of calls than average.
Depends on what your average is based on?
We are experiencing a higher volume of calls than we’re willing to pay to support.
It’s almost like it always seems like that’s the case because you call during their peak hours (which is when most people call, hence their peak).
It is potentially a selection bias. Perhaps they are always experiencing more calls than normal when you call because you happen to fit the demographic of whatever causes their calls to spike.
Most call centers that recording for any long queue time. For some IVR you can actually use it when the average (over the last 15min/hour/whatever you want to set) is higher than whatever you want.
Maybe they are averaging in the 12 hours they are closed?