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"Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed". Anybody ever find themselves wondering "have they?" or even worse "no they haven't" when it's a ho

by dvtrn 7y ago

"Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed". Anybody ever find themselves wondering "have they?" or even worse "no they haven't" when it's a hotline you're familiar with

bluGill 7y ago
They have changed - 5 years ago.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
EamonnMR 7y ago
I've had to call into a number of phone trees, and as far as I can tell, the entire phone tree process is designed to frustrate people away from support as much as possible. "Listen carefully as our options have changed" is something they can throw in to annoy you, waste more of your time, and discourage you from hitting the button you know will skip the dialogue.
maest 7y ago
I've had instances where I get told that "our lines are unfortunately very busy at the moment. If you do not wish to wait, you can find more information at our website or you can send an email at bla@bla.com. We expect the average waiting time to be 20 minutes." If you wait past that discouraging message, you get transfered to their support centre, and your call gets picked up in ~2-3 minutes. That message is a blatant attempt to reduce the load on their customer support by discouraging callers and making it a painful to use channel.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  That message is a blatant attempt to reduce the load on their customer support by discouraging callers and making it a painful to use channel This was my precise experience implementing analysis software, interactive telephony ("Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes") and going through the business case with senior management at an east coast call center ten years ago for a major consumer electronics and home appliance manufacturer, you probably have one of their smartphones in your pocket right now--call takers were saddled with what I thought were obscenely short call windows to resolve a call and be ready to take the next; three minutes to troubleshoot, diagnose and help a customer fix a washing machine, for example. One second over and the agents score went down, and they would face penalties. What got implemented was a maze of menu options that (and I can say this authoritatively and quite honestly) were not captured beyond the second level to filter and properly triage calls into hunt-groups or queues, or even do any sort of business analysis to determine where the most of our calls were going, but were deliberately designed to give agents more time on their existing calls and keep the hold queue artificially small. This is what exists at the root of my suspicion that this "menu options have changed" maneuver is all about numbers and stats that are ultimately meaningless in every practical definition that could be applied here. --- parting note: Ten years and a different telecom company later, I find myself staring at an email last week with the call center company's name on it, we've just signed a strategic partnership with them. Is it irony? Who knows. Am I chuckling morbidly? God yes.
  - nofunsir 7y ago
    How does one defeat these evil systems? For example, I recently had an emergency that I HAD to get in touch with a company, but kept being rerouted, re-advertized to, hung up on. The emergency unfortunately was not handled in time.
    - dvtrn 7y ago
      Wish I knew. For my part I actively suggested at every turn how to handle call flow and queuing much better, business partners had their minds made up and effectively wanted us to just "shutup and implement".
    - kingnothing 7y ago
      Try this: https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/ I have no association with that site other than using it occasionally.
  - saltminer 7y ago
    >not captured beyond the second level That explains why whenever I have to enter my account # or something over the phone, that information is never passed onto the human representative.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I would actually prefer they made it more blatant. Like if you're gonna nudge might as well just push. * Put people on a mandatory minimum hold of 15 minutes. Be explicit that they won't even enter the queue until then. * Play ads the entire time. Not for their own service, just whatever. * In between each ad have the message "press $RANDOM to continue waiting" and if you don't hear the right dial tone in the next 10 seconds just disconnect the call. Alternatively: * Charge $10 + $1/minute for phone support.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  I love the "please check our website" line. There's no way in hell I'd sit here on hold if your freaking website was working. The reason I'm here is that your website is broken.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  I was once asked to implement a system in Asterisk to park all incoming calls in a wait queue with a random time between 15 and 30 minutes before even transferring them to a ring group to be answered. I bailed on the project. The last thing I heard is that they were still arguing over which "your call is important to us" message sounded the most sincere...
Tactic 7y ago
As you likely suspect, it's just meant to get people to actually listen closely.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  That's not really a suspicion I have at all, since working with business groups full-time to this very day in building and deploying interactive voice systems, I suspect it's not about getting people to listen, it's about arbitrary OKRs.

by dvtrn 7y ago

"Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed". Anybody ever find themselves wondering "have they?" or even worse "no they haven't" when it's a hotline you're familiar with

bluGill 7y ago

They have changed - 5 years ago.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

EamonnMR 7y ago

I've had to call into a number of phone trees, and as far as I can tell, the entire phone tree process is designed to frustrate people away from support as much as possible. "Listen carefully as our options have changed" is something they can throw in to annoy you, waste more of your time, and discourage you from hitting the button you know will skip the dialogue.

maest 7y ago

I've had instances where I get told that "our lines are unfortunately very busy at the moment. If you do not wish to wait, you can find more information at our website or you can send an email at bla@bla.com. We expect the average waiting time to be 20 minutes." If you wait past that discouraging message, you get transfered to their support centre, and your call gets picked up in ~2-3 minutes. That message is a blatant attempt to reduce the load on their customer support by discouraging callers and making it a painful to use channel.

dvtrn 7y ago
That message is a blatant attempt to reduce the load on their customer support by discouraging callers and making it a painful to use channel This was my precise experience implementing analysis software, interactive telephony ("Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes") and going through the business case with senior management at an east coast call center ten years ago for a major consumer electronics and home appliance manufacturer, you probably have one of their smartphones in your pocket right now--call takers were saddled with what I thought were obscenely short call windows to resolve a call and be ready to take the next; three minutes to troubleshoot, diagnose and help a customer fix a washing machine, for example. One second over and the agents score went down, and they would face penalties. What got implemented was a maze of menu options that (and I can say this authoritatively and quite honestly) were not captured beyond the second level to filter and properly triage calls into hunt-groups or queues, or even do any sort of business analysis to determine where the most of our calls were going, but were deliberately designed to give agents more time on their existing calls and keep the hold queue artificially small. This is what exists at the root of my suspicion that this "menu options have changed" maneuver is all about numbers and stats that are ultimately meaningless in every practical definition that could be applied here. --- parting note: Ten years and a different telecom company later, I find myself staring at an email last week with the call center company's name on it, we've just signed a strategic partnership with them. Is it irony? Who knows. Am I chuckling morbidly? God yes.
- nofunsir 7y ago
  How does one defeat these evil systems? For example, I recently had an emergency that I HAD to get in touch with a company, but kept being rerouted, re-advertized to, hung up on. The emergency unfortunately was not handled in time.
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    Wish I knew. For my part I actively suggested at every turn how to handle call flow and queuing much better, business partners had their minds made up and effectively wanted us to just "shutup and implement".
  - kingnothing 7y ago
    Try this: https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/ I have no association with that site other than using it occasionally.
- saltminer 7y ago
  >not captured beyond the second level That explains why whenever I have to enter my account # or something over the phone, that information is never passed onto the human representative.
Spivak 7y ago
I would actually prefer they made it more blatant. Like if you're gonna nudge might as well just push. * Put people on a mandatory minimum hold of 15 minutes. Be explicit that they won't even enter the queue until then. * Play ads the entire time. Not for their own service, just whatever. * In between each ad have the message "press $RANDOM to continue waiting" and if you don't hear the right dial tone in the next 10 seconds just disconnect the call. Alternatively: * Charge $10 + $1/minute for phone support.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
I love the "please check our website" line. There's no way in hell I'd sit here on hold if your freaking website was working. The reason I'm here is that your website is broken.
noonespecial 7y ago
I was once asked to implement a system in Asterisk to park all incoming calls in a wait queue with a random time between 15 and 30 minutes before even transferring them to a ring group to be answered. I bailed on the project. The last thing I heard is that they were still arguing over which "your call is important to us" message sounded the most sincere...

Tactic 7y ago

As you likely suspect, it's just meant to get people to actually listen closely.

dvtrn 7y ago
That's not really a suspicion I have at all, since working with business groups full-time to this very day in building and deploying interactive voice systems, I suspect it's not about getting people to listen, it's about arbitrary OKRs.