Stop screaming!

[Phone Jockey]

Customer: I was on hold for forty five minutes! FORTY FIVE MINUTES! Were you on a lunch break or what? Are you the only person there?
Me: No mam.
Customer: Well, you must have been on a lunch break because FORTY FIVE MINUTES is how long I was on hold! Do you know that? Where were YOU?

[Broomjockey]

"Actually Ma'am, I had to deal with someone who was screaming about how she had been on hold for an HOUR, and that took about 45 minutes."

[Phone Jockey]

Broomjockey...well done. I really should have said that.

[Becks]

Is there any way to prove that she was actually on hold for 45 minutes?

[Phone Jockey]

Is there any way to prove that she was actually on hold for 45 minutes?

I don't think there is a way. I mean, we could probably check some stats, but who has time for that?

[Becks]

I mean, we could probably check some stats, but who has time for that?

Uh...someone who's been on hold for 45 minutes?

[One-Fang]

Absolutely every call centre should have the capacity in the software to show something like "Next caller line no: xx, queue time: 2m34s". This would make it much easier on the poor plebs who have to take the "I've been on hold for 45 minutes" calls without being able to say "no ma'am, it shows here you were on hold for 21 minutes".

[Mongo Skruddgemire]

Absolutely every call centre should have the capacity in the software to show something like "Next caller line no: xx, queue time: 2m34s".

We had one and it was a load of fun.

SC "I've been on hold for 32 minutes!"

Me "No, our queue indicator states you were on hold for 5 minutes. This is longer than we normally like to keep someone waiting and I do apologize"

Shuts them up pretty quick in most cases.

Or another favorite of mine

SC "I've been on hold for three goddamn hours!"

Me "Considering that I've only been open for 30 minutes I hardly see how that is possible. Had you called before we opened you would have had the answering machine. How may I help you today?"

I love being sugary sweet and kind to idiots...it really pisses them off.

Mongo

[Jester]

In restaurants, even though you can see the people, and know how long they have been there, they have always been there longer and waiting there longer than they actually have. "I've been waiting for an hour!" Meanwhile, you know it's been maybe fifteen minutes, if that.

The ultimate for that one is still the one I have related here about the people who wanted separate checks at the bar where house policy is no separate checks. This led to the following conversation with my coworker:

SC: "This is terrible! We've been coming here for thirty years!"
CW: "That's amazing...considering we've only been open for nineteen."

[Luna]

Customers at B&N would scream at me for being on hold all the time.


SC: "I've been on hold for 20 minutes!!" (I don't know why 20 is the chosen number all the time - but it was..apparently 15 is okay but 20 makes you go stark raving mad).

Luna: Actually, our phones time the calls the moment we answer - you've been on hold for 4 minutes and 27 seconds and that includes the time it took for you to tell me what book you wanted when I answered.

SC: *SILENCE*

[draftermatt]

While screaming doesn't get anywhere, I know I've been kept on hold for over 30 minutes before. Just last week in fact. I thought my cell was going to catch fire it was so hot. Then the lady hung up.... Hence my rant in off topic. But I didn't yell when I got someone finally. I was happy to get someone, and knew it wasn't their fault.

[phillippbo]

Anybody who works in a call center knows that "SC Standard Time" strongly correlates with rips in the space-time continuum, flux capacitors, and guys named "Doc". It also has strong parallels to something my friends and myself have dubbed "Drag Queen Standard Time" or "Queen Time" for short.

Without getting into a whole long thing, anybody who's witnessed a drag queen show knows that time moves differently for drag queens. When the show is going to start in 5 minutes, it could mean anything from 20 seconds to 45 minutes depending on the mood of said queen. Nothing against drag queens, I've actually had a couple of close friends who dress in women's clothes for fun and put on shows, but time does move in strange ways for them. Hope I didn't offend anybody.

Every time I hear a customer whine about being on hold for XXX minutes (especially when we rarely have anybody queue for longer than 5 minutes), it reminds me of my escapades with the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), Denver Center. If I could survive that, any hold times my customers complain about are chump change.

Once upon a time, I was in the National Guard, and was discharged before I finished basic training (long story). Anywho, before the Army would let me leave Ft. Benning, I had to turn in to them everything they had issued me (mostly uniforms). A couple of years after I had gotten back home, I turned in to my unit everything they had issued me (everything else a soldier would normally have except firearms). It took me awhile because I was ashamed to go to my unit, then moved, moved again, and yet again. That last time I moved, I left a lot of stuff in storage and forgot about it until I moved again into my current apartment. When I dug out the storage stuff, I found the National Guard equipment and turned it in. Unfortunately, the US Army had failed to tell the NC National Guard that the uniforms had been turned in at Ft Benning, and my old unit failed to tell their headquarters in Raleigh that I had turned in the rest of the equipment to them very, very late.

Now, enter DFAS. Since the NC National Guard was convinced I had kept everything that was issued to me, they appealed to the Pentagon under a federal law that allows the cash value of the equipment to be recouped by garnishing my tax returns. Incidentally, the first tax return I was denied was the first indication I had that there was a problem. DFAS was the government office that deals with such issues. Over the course of the ensuing three years, I would spend months calling them trying to straighten everything out. It would take about a week of calling before I could actually get into the queue (their queue had a limit to how many calls it could hold - if that were exceeded the system told you to call back later). When I could finally be put on hold, the wait was a minimum of an hour and a half, to one time a little more than 3 and a half hours! I know this was actual time because I got to the point where I timed it with the clock on the VCR. I promise you, no Drag Queen Standard Time here! Incidentally, since they only answered the phone from 9 AM to 6 PM my time, and I had no idea how long the wait would be, it made it VERY difficult to contact them at all. Who has literally an entire afternoon to devote to sitting on a phone doing nothing else?

(This doesn't even count the times where I held for a couple of hours only to not be able to talk to anyone. When the time clicked 17:00 Denver time, the system would cut off the queue and hang up on anybody holding with a message that the office was closed. Or the time that I fell asleep listening to the music and if anybody answered the phone they couldn't wake me.)

When I did FINALLY get to talk to someone, they never knew what they were talking about. One would say that I had to fax them a copy of some obscure form, and the next person wouldn't know anything about such forms. I was told no less than 3 times that everything was taken care of, then my next tax return would be garnished. When I finally got them a copy of the recpt from my unit showing I had turned in the equipment, the problem wasn't over because not a single person had ever told me, and none of the volumes of paperwork that was sent mentioned (and I read all of it - after all, over $3,000 of my money was at stake) that I owed money for the uniforms that I turned in to Ft. Benning.

(Some people will think that I'm lying or exaggerating. I am not, though I wish that I were.)

Oh, the leaps of logic people would jump through then! (Basically, everybody and their brother agreed that there was no way that the US Army would have let me leave Ft. Benning without turning in the uniforms that they said I didn't turn in. Since nobody was apparently allowed to question such things, they would then subsequently argue that I had to produce the uniforms or pay the money for them. Uniforms that there was no way I had in my possession. But the Army said that I did. Weeee!) Wild goose chases abounded for offices of people who no longer worked in the departments that could help me, or offices that had no idea what I was talking about, or couldn't help me. After a year of constant calling, I finally got in contact with an office in Ft. Benning who would have had my records, knew what I was talking about, and could release them to me. Oh, happy day! But, it was not to be resolved then because the records I would have needed had been destroyed six months earlier under some record management program. So, the Army couldn't prove anything and neither could I, but the government is never wrong, so...

... it took three phone calls from my Senator's office and one from my Representative over the course of a couple of months and everything magically went away. Sheesh.

Now, I have *no* sympathy from any customer unless they can at least reproduce the situation on at least ONE of my calls to DFAS. What I want to say is:

"Let me get this straight, Mr/Mrs Customer: you called us, had to wait for a couple of minutes to talk to someone who knows the answer to your question, your issue is resolved all within 10 minutes, and you want to COMPLAIN? Cry me a river..."

(Sorry that this was so long...)

[DesignFox]

I can believe that, occasionally, a customer might be on hold for 45+ minutes. That used to happen to me all the time at the two photo companies I worked for. (Half the time the customers would hang up, and then one of us poor slobs at the store would have to call for them to resolve the issue) Let's just say at Christmas time, customer service was hopping, and we employees didn't even have a way to jump the que. But I NEVER screamed at the poor service rep. Clearly, they were working just as hard as we were- and I have no sympathy for some idiot sitting on their couch at home who has nothing better to do but call customer service in an attempt to get free crap they don't deserve...especially since a lot of times, they were calling looking for an order we told them would take 4 weeks to process- one week after they ordered it!!! jerks...

Besides- less people calling with stupid problems would probably clear up the line for people with genuine issues...