Call Centers: Wow!! What a brilliant idea that was!! “Welcome to so and so. Please listen carefully and choose one of the following options. For Customer Services please press 1. For Accounts please press 2 and so on. For Complaints please press 9” So off course I choose my option happily holding on for my query to be solved. “All our agents are currently busy please hold on, your call is very important to us” Music starts, some even have a radio station you can listen to. So I hold on for a couple of minutes thinking that luckily this is one of those share call numbers so I am saving on the call. A few minutes later again I hear “All our agents are currently busy please hold on, your call is very important to us”.
Again I hear the music and start wondering what I will cook for dinner. Another couple of minutes pass by and the voice says again “All our agents are currently busy please hold on, your call is very important to us”. By this time I have probably been holding on for 10 minutes, reminding myself that I have already been online for that long I may just as well stick it out. I hear the voice again “All our agents are currently busy please hold on, your call is very important to us”.
This time my thoughts are not so happy anymore. How can my call be that important to them? I haven’t even spoken to a person yet!! But by now I am holding on purely to prove that my problem will be solved. Another couple of minutes and once again I hear “All our agents are currently busy please hold on, your call is very important to us” and then that dreaded click and the line goes dead. As I look at my telephone completely speechless, I start wondering how much that call just cost me.
This has happened to me nearly as many times as I have had to phone call centers. There is no use in complaining about it because what exactly are they going to do? Refund me the money for my wasted call? Do they even have enough staff to answer all these millions of calls that keep them so busy? Why on earth do I need to hold on when it could have just given me a busy signal and I would gladly have phoned back a bit later, without wasting money!
All this happened and the companies responsible are blissfully unaware that calls are being dropped and customers are losing hard earned money. Because of the use of this automated call centre system, you never speak to a person so they don’t even know you were there in the first place. So I say….Call Centers: WOW!!! What a brilliant waste of time!!!
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