In my experience in call centers it usually breaks down into 2 causes coming together 1) Support is viewed as cost centers so "maximizing" efficiency become

In my experience in call centers it usually breaks down into 2 causes coming together 1) Support is viewed as cost centers so "maximizing" efficiency becomes important to the executives in charge of it 2) Customers have very high expectations around what is an acceptable amount of time to wait to talk to an agent. Because of reason 1, things are optimized so tightly that a shockingly small amount of variation can cause really large shifts in wait times. As an example, I once worked for a cable company that averaged ~2,000 agents during peak call times. Every once in a while an office would have an unannounced fire drill, taking about 200 agents offline. When that happened wait times would go from about 90 seconds to over 10 minutes for the hour or two