reesesWeb

Why are we still waiting on hold? Why, when I call the DMV, the tax board, the bank, computer hardware support, the car rental company, or anyone other than my Mom, do I spend five, ten, fifteen, even forty minutes on hold?

Sure, I understand the Erlang formula, and how you can't have n resources on hand to handle n support requests. Sure, I understand the lower n sub r is, the lower your costs are, the higher your profits are, and possibly the lower the cost of goods/taxes/whatever are for the customer.

I understand that, and while it's annoying that I cannot expect to BE SERVED RIGHT NOW, it's a basic economic constraint. It's better to make me wait than to pay an extra few million dollars a year on mostly-idle resources.

That said, telephone technology is at least ten or fifteen years old now. We have really cool things like conference calls, call forwarding, call waiting, computer interfaces, and VOIP.

There are two stupidly clear ways to solve this problem:

1. A fundamental technology change.
2. A financially-motivated intermediary.

In the first case, the same PBX/telephone tree system can add an option whereby a caller can register their number and hang up. When their entry is first in the queue, the telephone system calls that number and prepares the customer for their interaction with the CSR. The CSR frees up, pops the top customer off the queue, and both parties are ready to talk. No hold music, no aggravation, no sore neck from cradling the phone against your shoulder. The queue can be shuffled if the first caller isn't available when a CSR frees up.

Otherwise, if you know you're going to be on hold, you call On Hold For You, tell them how to get on hold for you and when to call you back. You give them your cc#, your phone number, and you let them sit there listening to easy listening hits of the 70s and 80s. They get popped off the queue, they stall the CSR, and conference call you in.

Obviously, the second case is less fun for the support-providing organisation. You're going to increase their average call times just because the first 20 seconds will involve an offshored Indian resource making polite conversation while the customer comes on the line.

It's also going to be more expensive for the caller, who I am assuming will be more than happy to incur the cost of the service. Heck, if I were Dell, Apple, the California Franchise Tax Board, the DMV, or whomever, I would seed a company to start this, just to make my support staff a profit center instead of a cost center. It works with ATMs -- reduce my cost, make me money, and make the customers happy!

I've given up on teleportation, why can't I have those 20 minutes?

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit | technorati