Stop putting people on hold, period. We have the technology to just call back when they’re at or near the top of the queue. If they miss their call, maybe their number gets priority for an hour or something. Either way, when I get put on hold, I mostly fantasize about murdering whoever set up that system.
Yeah, it’s a feature dubbed “queued callback”. Saves your place, it’s a pretty common request. Customers like Delta, Intuit, Pacific Life, Citibank, Dyson, all use the platform I build (Amazon Connect) and do stuff like that.
Problem is, no one answers a call from an unknown number these days. Some phones are getting smart enough to recognize the number and show that it’s a business, though that’s more anecdotal evidence from my personal device (Pixel Fold with Google Fi carrier).
As someone who is also a phone system admin, if you had an older system, that feature was a pretty expensive feature to add on. We never purchased it because to buy what was needed to do it would’ve costed a ton. We did recently switch to a cloud pbx a few months ago and the one advantage I’ve seen is most of the high end features seem to be more readily available and cheaper when bundled with their packages so we finally got a lot of these options. RIP are the days of on prem systems.
I guess my point is I would imagine a lot of places still use older systems possibly and will wait as long as possible before upgrading and probably do not have the call back feature.
That’s a good point, a lot of people are still on old Avaya or Cisco systems and it was expensive to do that. A lot of cloud providers now don’t charge anything for it.
Yup, we were Avaya. Once Covid started, we looked into finally getting WFM and other features like this because we were a place that directly increased call volume due to covid but were unable to keep up with the amount of concurrent calls. We wanted to use the call back feature to help the agents who were overwhelmed and wouldn’t be able to get a large increase in help anytime soon. Especially since we knew these levels would only be temporary as well. In the end, it was not approved.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.
I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.
She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you
I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!
Stop putting people on hold, period. We have the technology to just call back when they’re at or near the top of the queue. If they miss their call, maybe their number gets priority for an hour or something. Either way, when I get put on hold, I mostly fantasize about murdering whoever set up that system.
Yeah, it’s a feature dubbed “queued callback”. Saves your place, it’s a pretty common request. Customers like Delta, Intuit, Pacific Life, Citibank, Dyson, all use the platform I build (Amazon Connect) and do stuff like that.
Problem is, no one answers a call from an unknown number these days. Some phones are getting smart enough to recognize the number and show that it’s a business, though that’s more anecdotal evidence from my personal device (Pixel Fold with Google Fi carrier).
Hold for me and call screening on the pixel is amazing. It’s so much better than any other feature available on any other phone.
As someone who is also a phone system admin, if you had an older system, that feature was a pretty expensive feature to add on. We never purchased it because to buy what was needed to do it would’ve costed a ton. We did recently switch to a cloud pbx a few months ago and the one advantage I’ve seen is most of the high end features seem to be more readily available and cheaper when bundled with their packages so we finally got a lot of these options. RIP are the days of on prem systems.
I guess my point is I would imagine a lot of places still use older systems possibly and will wait as long as possible before upgrading and probably do not have the call back feature.
That’s a good point, a lot of people are still on old Avaya or Cisco systems and it was expensive to do that. A lot of cloud providers now don’t charge anything for it.
Yup, we were Avaya. Once Covid started, we looked into finally getting WFM and other features like this because we were a place that directly increased call volume due to covid but were unable to keep up with the amount of concurrent calls. We wanted to use the call back feature to help the agents who were overwhelmed and wouldn’t be able to get a large increase in help anytime soon. Especially since we knew these levels would only be temporary as well. In the end, it was not approved.
Can’t you do just the same on Asterisk for free on your computer?
And then they start playing horrible, distorted wait music.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.
I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.
She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.
I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!
Take a number. Call back. Simple.