It depends on their window.
If they include call volume data back to the Neolithic period in their calculations, then yes, call volumes are higher than average (the average being 0.001 calls per century, rounding up).
Pretty sure that’s how they do the math.
Or just let’s assume the phones are open 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. The average call volume would be drastically lower than during business hours
They’d just need to include the call volume for when they’re closed. Open 9-5 but take the average over a whole 24 hour day.
It’s even simpler. A strictly increasing series will always have element n be higher than the average between any element<n and element n.
Or in other words, if the number of calls is increasing every day, it will always be above average no matter the window used. If you use slightly larger windows you can even have some local decreases and have it still be true, as long as the overall trend is increasing (which you’ve demonstrated the extreme case of).
It’s even simpler. They just lie about and always say it’s higher than average.
Yeah it’s fun seeing people figuring out which loophole companies use. Is it really anything other than they save a tiny bit of money by not giving a shit about your experience.
Eh, nothing I did was “figuring out which loophole [they] use”. I’d think most people in this thread talking about the mathematics that could make it a true statement are fully aware that the companies are not using any loophole and just say “above average” to save face. It’s simply a nice brain teaser to some people (myself included) to figure out under which circumstances the statement could be always true.
Also if you wanna be really pedantic, the math is not about the companies, but a debunking of the original Tweet which confidently yet incorrectly says that this statement couldn’t be always true.
actually, it is. let me explain.
Let’s simplify and say that there are peak hours and low hours. 100 people call during a peak hour, and 25 during a low hour. The chance of calling during a peak hour is 80%, since you are four times as likely to be one of the 100 rather than one of the 25.
The same effect means that you are almost always on planes and trains that are very full, even though every now and then they ride almost empty. Fewer people get to experience empty train rides by definition.
Of course this effect falls apart when your usage patterns differ from everybody else’s. If everybody takes the train at rush hour, you might ride an empty one at noon. Or, if you call the hotline while everybody else is sleeping, you might have a better chance.
But yeah companies also just lie to make themselves look better lol
You sound like a guy who knows which part of a warplane to reinforce.
Soo you’re saying we should increase train frequency for times when they’re empty?
If that frequency is once an hour compared to once in five minutes, then yes. If frequency is too low, then people are more likely to use alternative transport or not go at all.
The same goes for traffic. If you are experiencing traffic, you ARE traffic.
This is why PT is OP. The bigger traffic is - the smaller intervals are.
Yes, this is exactly it. You are calling when other people are calling. You are the congestion.
If you call before 11 AM you will have a much better time, as will the customer service operators.
Nah, they’re overloaded at that time too
Obviously. Because that’s the time all the people who want to avoid the congestion call.
“Your call is very important to us… but not so important that we would actually do anything about it like hiring more representatives. This message will repeat every 5 minutes until you get frustrated and hang up.”
The joke’s on them - my time has very little value anyway
Ugh I still have an air conditioner that was dead out of the box (bought it off season so didn’t use it till summer…summer 2020)
Tried a bunch of times to call in but “due to the pandemic” (what a fucking catchall for anti-consumer behavior…if a huge company hadn’t figured out how to keep their call center staffed 5 months into it, then it’s clearly intentional), nobody ever answered the call in the hour or so I’d wait on hold, several times.
I eventually gave up and just ate the cost.
In the future, chargeback for that?
Charge back for what? Ain’t the stores fault they sold as broken AC.
yeah, but they would be better able to put an rma through for you. it is kind of on them to guarantee a working product actually. if the manufacturer gave them a faulty product it’s up to them to get the manufacturer to fix it. most retailers have an entire system and process for this kind of stuff. things show up to retailers broken all the time. part of their job is to guarantee against that and deal with it if they fail to before you buy it. if you asked them to replace it with a like model that worked or for them to initiate an rma and they refused then you’d be in the right to issue a chargesback.
Also if you aren’t in USA, then your country’s consumer protection laws aren’t a meme and they probably violated them.
Charge back for what?
I read this in Lil Jon’s voice
Yeah…okay.
Now I hear it too. I hear the whole song. GET OUT OF MY HEAD
I know we all had to be way more patient and lenient during the pandemic, but I would say that it’s way more the store’s responsibility than yours for a defective product, and they should take responsibility for the consequences of doing business with manufacturers who have no customer support.
Where do you live that a store isn’t responsible for products they sell?
America.
Retailers are allowed to disclaim the merchantability and fitness for any particular purpose of the items they sell and most do. The customer is free to refuse, of course, via the simple expedient of going away and buying it somewhere else.
This is partially a blame-shifting exercise to reduce costs, yes, but it’s also a shield against the ceaseless horde of dipshits we have in this country who will willfully misuse a product and then immediately try to sue the retailer they bought it from when it doesn’t work or they hurt themselves with it via their own stupidity. It is much easier from a legal perspective to make a blanket “we don’t imply this product is applicable for any purpose” statement vs. having to explicitly predict whatever cockamamie thing someone might try it on and have to say “no, moron, that chainsaw is not suitable for cutting bricks,” etc.
Read all that fine print on the back of your receipt some day. You will be enlightened and, most likely, also infuriated.
Huh I didn’t realise that. I’m Australian but have been living in the USA for around 11 years.
Australia’s consumer laws are far stricter than the USA. In Australia, the store is responsible for fitness and quality of a product, based not just on its advertising but also what sales reps in the store say to you.
Obviously you can’t return something nor ask for a repair/replacement if you’re using it for something other than its intended purpose (like using a chainsaw on bricks or whatever), but otherwise, the law is in your favour as a consumer.
Stores must also accept warranty returns and not say that you need to go to the manufacturer. It’s not legal to say “no refunds”.
Products must last at least as long as a reasonable consumer thinks they should last. For example, a fridge would have to be repaired or replaced under warranty if it stops working after 4 years, even if the warranty is only 1 year, as most people would reasonably expect a fridge to last more than 4 years.
It means some stuff costs more, but it’s absolutely worth it for the protection you get.
Oh I’m used to the idea of ordering AC units straight from manufacturer.
It doesn’t help that a lot of companies outsource their call centers to third party vendors who only care about keeping the contract and not about the main company’s customers.
As opposed to the main company, which cares so much that they don’t bother taking your call directly
Yes, that’s why they outsource.
That’s what it’s all about, saving on overhead and the percentage of people who give up. Its not just corporations to, ever sign up for any public assistance? You WILL be denied to see if you will give up.
Maybe I will give up when the draft happens. The 1% can defend its own country, it’s clearly not ours.
Interestingly, British consumer rights guru Martin Lewis is currently running a crowdsourced data gathering exercise on this in the UK.
The purpose being to identify if companies are purposefully playing these sorts of message no matter their actual call volume. (Which we all know they are, but this will help prove it)
Call the Sales/new accounts line and see how long it takes them to pick up.
Makes sense if the average includes the hours of zero calls when their phone line is closed
Especially if it’s one of those awful ones that are only open for 5 minutes on the fifth Wednesday of the same month.
During a leap year. Where Squirrel Appreciation Day falls on a Sunday.
Gotta cram an equinox and Jupiter in there somewhere.
Squirrel Appreciation Day is everyday. The little furballs deserve some love.
I found the squirrel
squee
You don’t have any evidence!
Read here: all utilities and banks in America. Oh you want to call and talk about something important regarding your natural gas bill or mortgage? Call between 10am and 4pm Monday-Friday to talk to one of our dedicated Sri Lankan representatives. Oh you work during that time? Good, that’s the point lol
I sell and build call centers for a living.
Yeah, it’s fake lol. I mean maybe for some businesses it isn’t fake, but usually clients would ask us to make it where “if there’s more than X calls in queue, play the message”. Turns out, there’s always more than X calls in queue. It’s not actually looking at the average.
It’s kinda weird, some things are just always like that, some things clients want to add in because the average user expects it.
Someone wanted a repeat caller to get bumped to the front of the queue. Literally encouraging the “if I hang up and call back I’ll get there sooner” people. Awful.
Stop putting people on hold, period. We have the technology to just call back when they’re at or near the top of the queue. If they miss their call, maybe their number gets priority for an hour or something. Either way, when I get put on hold, I mostly fantasize about murdering whoever set up that system.
Yeah, it’s a feature dubbed “queued callback”. Saves your place, it’s a pretty common request. Customers like Delta, Intuit, Pacific Life, Citibank, Dyson, all use the platform I build (Amazon Connect) and do stuff like that.
Problem is, no one answers a call from an unknown number these days. Some phones are getting smart enough to recognize the number and show that it’s a business, though that’s more anecdotal evidence from my personal device (Pixel Fold with Google Fi carrier).
Hold for me and call screening on the pixel is amazing. It’s so much better than any other feature available on any other phone.
As someone who is also a phone system admin, if you had an older system, that feature was a pretty expensive feature to add on. We never purchased it because to buy what was needed to do it would’ve costed a ton. We did recently switch to a cloud pbx a few months ago and the one advantage I’ve seen is most of the high end features seem to be more readily available and cheaper when bundled with their packages so we finally got a lot of these options. RIP are the days of on prem systems.
I guess my point is I would imagine a lot of places still use older systems possibly and will wait as long as possible before upgrading and probably do not have the call back feature.
That’s a good point, a lot of people are still on old Avaya or Cisco systems and it was expensive to do that. A lot of cloud providers now don’t charge anything for it.
Yup, we were Avaya. Once Covid started, we looked into finally getting WFM and other features like this because we were a place that directly increased call volume due to covid but were unable to keep up with the amount of concurrent calls. We wanted to use the call back feature to help the agents who were overwhelmed and wouldn’t be able to get a large increase in help anytime soon. Especially since we knew these levels would only be temporary as well. In the end, it was not approved.
Can’t you do just the same on Asterisk for free on your computer?
And then they start playing horrible, distorted wait music.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.
I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.
She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you
I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!
Take a number. Call back. Simple.
So the length of the queue is the expected average, right? Then, if you fall off that you are therefore the above average call in the message… except the length of the queue probably doesn’t actually much to do with any kind of average of the number of calls.
Once a year they receive negative a billion calls on a day that is later erased, and it really skews the average
Also: “Please listen closely as our menus have recently changed.”
because I call the customer service line of any one company so much, that I have memorized their touch tone menu
9 months into my daily call to Maytag: Excuse me, babe. I have to walk into the other room so I can listen. Apparently, they’ve changed their phone menu.
I had so many issues with Scottish Power that I pretty much did. Fucking useless company.
Technically true If they close the phone line at night.
Yeah but it sounds a lot better than “We’ve pursued a policy of understaffing to save costs”.
A steadily increasing curve would always be above its average, no?
Call center go brrrrrrrr?
Well, aaaactually, don’t they have more than average calls half of the time?
Not necessarily. They could be constantly ever so lightly above the average value, but then once in a while, a really low value comes along and drags the average down. What you’re thinking of is the median.
Easily achievable if you only take calls in working hours. Then all working hours will have more than average calls per hour for a day.
You can also continously have above average per worked hour for the staff if you keep firing people, because then calls per person keeps going up
Maybe they’re taking the average for each day over the whole 24 hours, but the call centre only operates from 9:30-4:30.
Yeah, like at night it falls down to 0
That would be true for the median, but not for the average
Sure you can. If the average is over 24 hours, then any time the phone line is open they’re getting higher than the average number of calls. X2 if you include weekends and holidays.
Found their lawyer
Eehrm, acktually, the tweet is wrong 🤓
You can always be getting a result above average in a series of numbers as long as the nth number is significantly greater than the previous ones. For example, f(x) = x^2 would always be above average for every next number
I like the idea of an infinitely exponentially growing base of users seeking help from some poor call center
This honestly sounds like it could be the basis for a novella
It sounds like something that happens regularly during an update to software with a lot of users.
if it is considering the average for all of history, then the rate of change would just have to be consistently greater than 0, right ?
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