On Hold

Sandy

“Please hold. An agent will be with you as soon as possible”

I’m on hold with a government agency’s call center. They’re torturing me with staticky music and it’s making my eyeballs hurt. I wonder about the person in charge of call center music. Someone who’d take Beethoven’s least favorite symphony, channel it through a hand cranked gramophone and add extra layers of scratches for effect. What kind of psyche or psycho does that?

“Did you know that online government services are available online at www …”

Should I forsake this call and go online? It’s a choice between indefinite hold and indeterminate outcome.

I took the bait, once. For a different agency, for a different reason. I gave up my line in the queue and followed the link.

I was invited to text my inquiries to a “Can I help you?” chat box. It made me thumb-type my credentials and select from a list of questions. After following a stream of dead-end options, I chose ‘Other’ and typed out my question. I had to re-word and re-type my inquiry to suit the bot’s vocabulary. All to be rewarded with the bot claiming ignorance and an inability-to-help. It told me to phone the call center.

“Your call in important to us. Your estimated wait time is …”

I once had an estimated wait time of one hour and thirty-seven minutes. It was an important call. I had no choice but to wait. I put the phone on speaker, put on my noise cancelling headphones and set it to just enough volume to hear the muzak but not listen to it, and waited. At one hour and three minutes, the call center hung up on me.

Once in a while, I’ll get an agency who splurged on an upgraded call center plan.

“Your estimated wait time is … (close to forever.) Would you like an automated call-back?”

The first time I heard this I was deeply suspicious. Who’s to say they would actually call-back? Who’s to say this wasn’t another bait & switch tactic? I buried my scepticism and pressed #1 for call-back. Imagine my delight when I got the call-back! Of course, my enthusiasm was immediately dampened. The automated call-back automatically put me on hold.

“Your call is important to us. Thank you for waiting.”

After a while my mind and eyeballs are lulled into a numb, semi-meditative state. So much so that I don’t recognise the agent’s voice when they interrupt my hold.

“Hello. Hello. How may I help you?”

Ahh! Excuse me blogger-friends. I gotta take this call. Pardon me if I put this post on hold. 😉

20 Comments

  1. Telus sent us a new modem in the mail to replace our old modem. There were absolutely no instructions, either with the modem, or and the best I got online was a forum where someone, a real person, wrote: “I think it’s just a straight-over swap. In the end, we had a multi-week experience being on hold with Telus and now know about 12 very nice people who live in the Philippines. (PS. Telus really needs to do something about their ‘call-waiting’n-hold’ music – it is absolutely awful!)

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    1. On Hold with Telus deserves it’s own blog post! It seems like they take every opportunity to do something wrong. However, they do seem to have the nicest people in their call center.

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  3. Can relate. I think the wait time is more in the western world. In New Delhi it was 10-15 minutes maximum but in Calgary I have had to wait more than 45 mins to be told lease leave a message😡

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    1. I’m not sure if it’s the western world or ‘progress’ in general. Wait times never used to be this long … in the same way as all call centers used to be based in North America before moving to Philippines and India and before being replaced by chat and AI voice bots!

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      1. My experience is more with local Clinics, hospitals, offices. One is put on a never ending hold that makes me wonder if ‘they are really so busy’.

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  4. I hear ya, Sandy. The same thing has happened to me. The umemployed call centre workers must number in the thousands by now. Ai and a pretty basic Ai response offerings sent you round and round in circles without any kind of option to speak to a real person to explain your query.

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  5. Oh yes, your call is VERY important to us! Hahaha!!! So important, in fact, that we are willing to bet you’ll stay on the line while we waste your time. The bottom line is always the sole beneficiary of the so-called “advancements” in customer service. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you that I’ve done professional voice work for many years and used to have a client who requested all kinds of IVR (interactive voice response) scripts. There was one that was specifically designed to give callers a runaround, with zero hope of speaking to someone. I wondered after that how many people cursed my voice!

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    1. I’m thinking yours would be a perfect setup for a Sienfeld sketch … Jerry meets an ideal woman but can’t figure out why somethings wrong … not until he calls to & gets her voice recording!! 🤣

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  7. Hahah! I can relate: I’m currently waiting for a callback but I’d like to go to sleep. Dilemma!!! Should I stay up and wait or just forget about it? What to do, hmm! But luckily when we get a callback, it’s an actual person, not a machine. I don’t think I’d have enough patience for that.

    And I can’t stand chatbots! I always start by saying that I’d like to speak to a real person. Sometimes it lets me skip the chitchat, but not always.

    And sometimes the human is just as bad as the bot, not listening, just copy-pasting!

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    1. I’m not alone in my pain! A more recent phenomena is the voice chat-bot. I’ve listened to my husband trying to be polite to this pleasantly fake AI woman before degenerating to “HUMAN. I WANT to speak to a HUMAN!”

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