“Your call is important to us.”
“The next available customer service representative will be with you shortly.”
“We are experiencing higher than normal demand at the moment. Please stay on the line to preserve your place in the queue. Calls may be recorded for staff training purposes.”
“If you are calling about this, press 1 now. If you are calling about that, press 2 now. If you are calling about the other, press 148 now. Or stay on the line to speak to an operator. Your call is important to us.”.
Yeah, right.
We have all encountered the abomination that is the automated telephone system at some stage, together with their assorted sycophantic variants too numerous to regurgitate.
No matter the actual words that are being talked at you, the translation for all of the variants is:
“Your call is an interruption to our day of navel contemplation and we wish you hadn’t bothered to call. However, seeing you’re here, if you know the extension of the person you wish to speak to, please dial it now. If you don’t, we will strive to irritate you for as long as possible by reciting this incredibly long list of options you can press now to be diverted to another automated answerphone system in a parallel universe. Then, while you watch your life, your phone battery, and your will to live all ebb away, we will insult your intelligence, the last vestiges of your sanity and self-worth with the most outrageously cacophonous music played by a tune-deaf zebra on an out-of-tum harpsichord down the far end of a toilet roll tube. And we will add insult to injury by interspersing it every 40 seconds with advertisements for products and services that you will never have any likelihood or desire to want or need.
“And. in the unlikely event that you do interact, we will gleefully take the opportunity to direct you to a third parallel universe.”
Further translation:
Further translation:
“In the interests of maximising profits for our masters and shareholders, we fired our minimum-wage-paid customer-facing staff and replaced them with this one-off, low-cost car crash of an automated phone system.”
“Our sole living operator is in the toilet / cooking a roast meal / on leave of unspecified duration and will be with you shortly.”
Further translation:
“if you press any button that we have recommended, this whole fool system will collapse in on itself and your call will be sent into a huge astrological black hole from which it will never reappear.”
Now, I understand that paying A Person to sit around reading magazines and waiting for the phone to ring will incur on-going cost. It makes economic sense to have someone record a whole raft of standard waffle onto a tape that can be used over and over to bamboozle customers, while the someone moves on to pastures new.
Or, more probably, the unemployment queue.
The pre-recorded message system works well where the transaction does not benefit from consumer feedback; for example, announcing the arrival and departure details of trains at railway stations. Although that relationship came to grief recently when a power outage stopped the trains but not the announcements – the latter kept cheerfully announcing on, while no actual train action was taking place.
The result was a whole heap of confusion which took a bit of sorting to get back in synch.
But for the enquiring customer, the whole point of ringing up in the first place was for People Contact: you ask a question, you get an answer.
It gives a warm fuzzy feeling to have interaction with another human. You might consider that providing customers with warm fuzzies would be a core building block of service.
Setting your customer’s teeth on edge with stupid information that has no relevance whatsoever to their needs must be counter-productive.
Maybe the logic behind it is that all your competitors are doing it to. There is no better service to be got, no matter where they might go.
But I keep coming back to the thought that if my call was that important to you, wouldn’t you have someone there for me to talk to?
Footnote: A friend recently provided a solution of sorts to the horror of the automated pre-recorded message.
If you raise your voice to just below Screaming and start to loudly recite obscenities, a Person miraculously appears on the other end of the line. There was one there all the time – they were just hiding!
Try it. It’s fun!
And I’d love to be there when the recording of that call gets re-played for staff training purposes!