I always thought that “We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes” just meant “We are experiencing normal call volumes and we underinvest in customer service.”
I don’t remember the last time I called Air Canada Aeroplan where the hold time wasn’t at least an hour. One of the best things about status is jumping to the top of the queues so that my time isn’t wasted. Although that isn’t always a help. During the pandemic Delta Air Lines hold times got up to 41 hours for Diamond members.
It turns out, though, that some companies make customers wait on hold even when they have phone reps available?
It’s lower cost to get customers to do self-service online, whether making transactions on a company’s website or looking up information themselves. But if you make it too easy to get customer service by phone, customers won’t do that.
HP had added 15 minute holds as a requirement to get phone service for PC and printer customers.
At the beginning of a call to telephone support, a message will be played stating: “We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience. The next available representative will be with you in about 15 minutes.
“To quickly resolve your issue, please visit our website support.hp.com to check out other support options or find helpful articles and assistant to get a guided help by visiting virtualagent.hpcloud.hp.com.”
…”The wait time for each customer is set to 15 minutes – notice the expected wait time is mentioned only in the beginning of the call.” The message will be read out three times during the wait time, after the initial reading.
The reason for the change? Getting people to figure it out themselves using online support. As HP put it: “Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve,” and “taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies.”
Leaked documents about the change embarrassed HP, and forced them to reverse course. After years of long hold times, though, Aeroplan’s holds haven’t really sped up sadly.
Sometimes call volumes are higher than normal – bad weather events cancelling flights – airlines don’t do even more to boost call center capacity during these events because it’s costly, as well.
This is the sad state of customer service today.
I have black listed some airlines due to their obscene wait times.
I don’t mind holding all that much if there is silence or music on hold – I just put the call on speaker and do work or read another web page. What I hate is when they have announcements – either advertising or thanking me for continuing to hold – which makes it impossible to concentrate on something else.
This has become less of a problem as my Pixel has “Hold for Me” built in, where I don’t hear anything while on hold, and I am notified when a live agent has come online. This seems to work on about 80% of the number I call where I have to hold, and I believe it only works on toll-free numbers.
“due to the enormous success of our latest widget, our hold times are longer than usual” is one of the most disingenuous things to hear, ” No guys, the reason is that you’re too cheap to staff up properly, Just makes me thing that the company I’m on the phone with is dishonest and that I’d rather find a different vendor…. which I often do.
The last few times I called a non airline customer service, I got the “we are experiencing higher than usual call volume”, but as soon that bot finished saying that, I was instantly connect to a human. This was for the same company.
Seeing that every company does that, we all know they’re lying. Maybe they should lay off the holding robot.
The IRS has a way to correct Cal Volumes. they say Please call back on another day then disconnect. Talk about F U.
I have wait times of 60+ min then a disconnect.
My mother worked in a bank and at 5pm she would say hello hello can not hear you then move to the next caller at 5 the call would switch to call back tomorrow. que was empty she went home.
I recall in a company I worked for back in late 2010’s, we did the actual math for the cost of customer contact per point:
Average text message/web chat: $0.80
Average website/form inquiry: $1.20
Average email: $2.13
Average telephone call: $14.30
That’s how much it cost our organization when you put the numbers and dollars behind it. Not everyone is similar, but this was ours.
Just spent 1hr 15 mins on hold with Aeroplan at 7am on a Sunday…..gave up. Self service isn’t available to me on their site (which I would have availed myself of if available as waiting on hold is slightly less attractive to me than poking my eyeballs out with bamboo spikes). Complete failure of customer service. And this is not even a change to an award I am initiating – (half of) my award flights were changed due to schedule changes……
Not just on purpose. Saving money by not hiring enough people.
What I hate is the suggestion to go online to fix your problem. If I could do that, I wouldn’t call.