Please

Please

Hold, Please

17 November 2005
Filed under Technology, Text

I hate being on hold. I’m generally a pretty impatient person, and sitting for 25 minutes with the phone jammed up against my ear, getting a stiff neck and listening to promotional messages only to be given inaccurate information in a patronising tone at the end of it all, well, it really rubs me up the wrong way. In fact, if I’m on hold for less than five minutes, and my problem is somewhat solved by the end of the phone call, I’m prone to dancing for joy, so low are my expectations of the tech support experience. The fact that most problems with phone support are fairly cheaply solvable, and that customer goodwill is one of a business’s greatest assets, makes bad tech support all the more infuriating.

Phone Menus

Unlike most people, I’m not totally averse to an automated phone menu, as long as it’s clear and consise (no more than three layers), and comes with an escape hatch: “…or dial 6 to speak to a real human being”. This is such a no-brainer that I can’t believe I’m even mentioning it. I HATE phone menus that ask for information (like your phone number or the broadband plan you’re on), that you’re then asked for again by the human operator.

Messages For Morons

ISPs, quite reasonably, tend to announce known system outages before the phone menu kicks in: “Customers on phone exchanges in the eastern and north-eastern regions may be experiencing connection difficulties blah blah blah”. Good idea. As long as the messages are short, and can be skipped, I don’t have any objection. My ISP is taking this technique to extremes, however: first, system outage messages (if any), followed by ‘Did you know we’ve got a new dialup number?’, with instructions for changing your dialup settings. (That message has been up for more than two months now, and despite the fact that there are different branches of the phone system for broadband and dialup customers to follow, they still feel the need to inflict this entirely useless information on everybody. It’s skippable, but they don’t tell you that, or how.)

But wait… there’s more: at the END of the phone menu, but BEFORE you’re given the hold time estimate or transferred to hold, you have to be told to “try restarting your modem and computer. Most connection problems can be solved in this way… etc”. I’m not dead-against this message per se, but it’s completely unskippable, and if you’re hearing it for the third, or twentieth, time, it’s likely to make you (me) throw the phone against the wall.

Finally, there’s this: “Did you know that we offer comprehensive online support?” Yes, I did. Did you know that I’m on hold to you, my dear ISP, because I CAN’T CONNECT TO THE INTERNET? Faaaark.

Baby, can you spare an hour?

There should ALWAYS be an (accurate) estimate of how long you’re going to be expected to hold, and if it’s going to be longer than ten minutes (or even eight), you should be given the option of requesting a callback. This choice is worth its weight in goodwill gold: giving your customers numb ears and neck-cricks is a failsafe way of getting them to desert you in droves.

Your call is not important to us

Advertising messages and commercial radio should never, ever be played as hold music. Just. Don’t. Do. It. And worse: my last ISP featured ‘Radio [ISP Name]’, a pair of radio-voiced morons telling jokes and playing a couple of pop songs, in an imitation of commercial radio. But it was on a 10-minute loop, meaning that on bad days, you might hear the same abominable joke TWO OR THREE TIMES while waiting. Not funny. And lastly, while it’s probably appropriate to thank people for their patience while on hold, it’s more irritating than soothing to be told “Your call is important to us, and will be answered as soon as possible”. It’s not informative, and by the time you’ve been on hold for fifteen minutes it’s clearly just an outright lie: if my call was important to you, you’d have answered it by now. So shut up.

What’s YOUR problem?

Every tech support phone service that expects repeat visits should keep notes about a customer’s technical competence. Better than that, they should ASK you, the first time you ring, to estimate your problem-solving ability and general knowledge about technical issues. For me, there’s nothing worse than coming off 25 minutes of hold, only to be asked ‘is the little green little light labeled ‘power’ blinking?” or “the blue cord - is that plugged into your computer?” While it’s obviously necessary to eliminate simple causes when troubleshooting, it drives me NUTS to be treated like that, particularly after three or four calls about the same (complex) problem.

I almost lost it yesterday with a support guy who asked “have you tried resetting the modem?” at least three times, before asking me to “turn the modem around and stick a paper clip in the little tiny hole next to the power button”. “You mean RESET THE MODEM?” I asked. “I’ve ALREADY DONE THAT. THREE TIMES.” I don’t know if I get particularly bad treatment because I’m a woman, but it’s a surefire way to make me angry, and it’s completely avoidable. They’ve got customer databases there - I can hear them entering information into them - so why not USE them?

Case /#453521-a

If somebody’s got a problem that will require multiple phone calls to fix, then for god’s sake assign one support person to the case, give the customer a case number, email it to them for good measure, and give them a direct line so that when they call back they’re not forced to find their way through phone mazes or wait on hold.

Feel free to add your thoughts, suggestions and anecdotes about phone support in the comments - I’m going to send my ISP a loooong list.

Views from the Floor

Tom says:

Sorry I'll stop hogging your comments, but I had dealings with iPrimus in such matters not terribly long ago.

Minimum 20 minutes on hold every time (just to get a yes or no answer!), with a repeating message about their support website. If I have to hear that message with someone saying "duboo-yoo duboo-yoo duboo-yoo dot" one more time, I WILL kill...something.

And you have no idea (actually you might have a pretty good idea) how infuriating it is to be told to visit the support website when the reason you're ringing is because you don't have any fucking internet access!!

GGGGGrrrrrrrr.

*takes deep breath*

*removes teeth from iPrimus help-desk person*

*puts teeth back in mouth*

Peter says:

The woman thing is interesting. And I suspect you may be right. Given that I.T. is such a machismo-filled, cock-waving little business, it wouldn't surprise me if you are assumed to be a moron by the tenor (alto) of your voice.

Interestingly, I recently reported a hardware fault with my machine. I told them, in my booming and confident baritone, that it was X. They believed me. They are sending someone out to replace X. Now, I'm not completely sure it's X. It's probably X, but they didn't ask me a single diagnostic question.

Could I be getting the other end of the inherent-gender-bias-in-IT-support stick? (And could I mix metaphors any more?)

kate says:

Primus got some pretty terse phone calls from me recently when my landline stopped working.

The Problem: they hadn't sent me any bills, I therefore hadn't given them any money, they cut me off. They had been sending the bills for my current phone number to my old address, ie. Their Fault.

It took two weeks worth of calling, approximately 4 hours on the phone, and a lot of unneccessary stress (for all my friends who had to listen to me) to get them to fix this. In the meantime I had no internet because I am a dial-up girl.

I explained, very patiently, that I am a postgrad student who needs internet access and that this problem was urgent. They were very sypathetic but they didn't have enough billing staff to even put me in the phone queue.

Somebody asked me why, when I hadn't received a bill, I didn't ring to ask for one. I told them I didn't work in their billing department.

Then I snapped. I told them my sister was dying (quite truthfully) and that my thesis was nearly due. I didn't cry but I was close. They let me pay the bills over the phone and reconnected me. They expected me to cheer when they waived the reconnection and late payment fees.

If their system didn't suck so much, this would have taken 20mins, tops, to fix.

Helen says:

I'm weighing in here with my pet gripe: Hold music that is regularly interrupted by a pre-recorded human voice. Every single time this voice breaks through the hold music I get fooled into thinking someone has answered my call, and finding that i've been sucked in by the recorded voice (again and again) only compounds my irritation.
On a positive note: in my previous career as a receptionist, I used to have to make outgoing calls to organisations like phone companies as well as answer all the normal incoming calls. My technique used to be to put their hold music on speakerphone, and then put them on hold while I answered my own calls, periodically checking to see if anyone had picked up yet. You'd be surprised by how often I'd check back in and find a call centre operator patiently waiting for me to finish my other call before getting around to them. Ooo, it made me feel good all over.

miss jane says:

my personal call centre nemesis is dodo. i believe that one day the customer service renaissance will come and dodo will finally take hold of its moniker-predicted destiny. and die.

ps. if anyone has had any positive service experiences it'd be cool to hear of em. i'll throw money* at these companies. these foot soldiers in the service war.

* money, in my bank account, being a most relative thing

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