5 hours of listening to a telephone queue June 11, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Computers , trackbackLast week I spent over 5 hours on the telephone, 30 minutes of this time was spent actually talking to an operator, 40 minutes I was awaiting a returned call from the operators (which they did not make) and nearly 4 hours was spent listening to a looped message telling me that a customer service representative would be with me soon. I began calling them at 11pm, finally getting to sleep at 5am with the ‘please be patient’ message imprinted into my brain.
Reliving the agony of reaching Efax’s customer service department by phone is likely to reduce me to tears. To summarize though;
* This was the THIRD time I needed to contact the company in a week
* I spent over $60 calling them by phone
* In total I spent over 11 hours on the phone to Efax to resolve a problem that they had caused me.
* Efax’s queueing system will randomly disconnect their line, usually after holding for between 20 and 40 minutes.
* I shall do everything in my power to never use Efax again.
I can’t pretend I was my usual happy self the following day but my aural-torture sparked an idea which may prevent anybody having to inconvenience themselves when they are put on hold.
I’m investigating creating a computer program which you can use during similar calls. What it will do is loop a message back to the company saying “The caller is patiently waiting, please say ‘I am back’ when you are available and he will immediately return to the phone”. As soon as the operator says that, the program will sound a loud alert from the computer speakers, to prompt the caller to return to the phone.
The benefits are that;
* You’d no longer have to listen to the looped message and could therefore enjoy watching TV or relaxing.
* By setting your computer speakers loud, you could actaully go to bed or go to a different room whilst waiting.
The main technical issue with developing this is that the computer must be able to distinguish between the looped message and a human operator. Myself and my programmers have a few ideas about this and hopefully I can get it created for less than $100.
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