“We Estimate That Your Wait Time Is More Than 15 Minutes”
Okay. Obviously, we need to lay down some ground rules about putting people on hold.
Rule 1: You must have inoffensive music playing to let people know you haven’t hung up on them.
Rule 2:Anything of the Ohrwurm variety is forbidden, unless you particularly want to torture your customers. No “Girl from Ipanema” or “Macho Man.” Also nothing too chirpy, lest you seem to be laughing at your irate customers’ plights. Keep in mind, though, that even the blandest elevator music begins to grate after extended exposure.
Rule 3: Please make sure the music is a reasonably high-quality recording. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch — my dodgy hearing makes the very concept laughable — but even I find it irritating when my on-hold music sounds like a distant AM radio station in a violent thunderstorm and three other interfering stations playing violently contrasting music. This is particularly annoying with piano music, because the poor recording quality makes the higher notes very plinky and grating.
Rule 4: Limit interruptions the music to thank people for their patience and tell them that a representative will be with them shortly to no more than once every few minutes. If you interrupt every 30 seconds, the effect will be rather the opposite, and your customers will wind up grinding their teeth to nubs. They will also time the intervals between interruptions on their friendly neighborhood iPods, and then blog about it. If, as the wait time goes over 10 minutes, you start interrupting to thank them for their patience even more frequently, then you will only piss them off even more.
Rule 5: If you absolutely must interrupt the awful and staticky music, at least resume playing the same song when you’re done. Don’t start another, completely different song by the same gawdawful pseudo elevator jazz ensemble that sounds like they got drummed out of the Guild of Really Dreadful Musicians for being just too bloody awful. Honestly, you can just see them in their threadbare gold rhinestone jackets, grinning bleached white grins set in orange-bottle-tan faces, wagging their heads in time to their music but failing to notice their toupees have come loose and are flopping around disturbingly like distressed flounders.
Rule 6: Absolutely no saxophone Muzak.
Actually, I think it’s a plot of the phone/DSL company. If you call because your modem is apparently fried and only has one glowing red eye instead of four shimmery green ones, then they know that, if they keep you on the line long enough, either you’ll run out of minutes on your mobile and have to pay extraordinary amounts of money, or, if you’re on a cordless landline, your battery will die and you’ll have to call back later, or give up.
Caveat: None of the above rant should be taken as irritation with helpdesk people themselves. It’s a stressful job, as I know — one of my duties at my last job was providing tech support to our in-house authors, which was alternately hysterical, nausea-inducing, and desperately sad — and I do honestly try to be as polite, friendly, and grateful as I possibly can. I certainly plan to be sweetness and light itself, if I ever succeed in getting a real person on the line. I even understand long waits; I’ve been waiting approximately 30 minutes as I type this, and am getting seriously worried about my landline battery conking out, but I realize that the rather spectacular thunderstorm we had here last night probably wreaked all manner of havoc with people’s DSL. (It certainly destroyed the security system for my building, making it impossible to open the communal front door from the outside.) I just really, really wish that the phone company would get their bloody stupid, maddening, freakishly irritating automated system sorted out. I’d do it for them, gratis.
Addendum: After 45 minutes, I finally got to a Real Person. Together we determined that, yes, Mr. Modem is no more, the plumage don’t enter into it, he’s gone to meet his maker, if not nailed to his perch he would’ve been pushing up the daisies, and is indeed an ex-parrot, etc. They’re shipping a new one that should be here by Thursday (woo hoo!), and apparently are not going to charge me for it (woo hoo again!). In the meantime, any blogging I do will probably be intermittent; this post, for instance, was typed at home on OpenOffice’s Writer, and then ferried furtively to the office on Fenric for backdated posting over lunch.
Hey, at least it’s a change for you lot from All Sweden, All the Time. (And I was going to post about the Swedish newscast that accidentally showed porn clips in the background, too. Shame. Go look it up on the BBC, or your news provider of choice.)
