@daedalus We have deliberately short staffed our call centre.

Luckily for you, you've managed to reach us at a time when there's an unusually low volume of calls.

Turns out 9am the Monday immediately after a public holiday, when people are still away, is a great time to call.

Unfortunately, we're deliberately placing you on hold for a mandatory minimum of 15 minutes, because fuck you! We want you to piss off and sort it out on our website!

(It happens: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/if-you-ever-got-the-feeling-a-customer-support-line-is-intentionally-keeping-you-on-hold-in-the-hope-youll-go-away-it-turns-out-the-hp-is-doing-precisely-that-with-a-minimum-15-wait/)

All our staff have KPIs around getting you off the phone in five minutes, as well as cross-selling or upselling products.

When it turns out that you've got a particularly complicated edge case, and our low-cost contractors completely screwed up your order, our staff won't be authorised to fix your complaint.

So they'll say they'll transfer you to a different department, and then place you on hold, and your call will be lost in our PABX system until it's eventually cut off.

After four calls and 17 transfers, you'll luck out and get an experienced and competent customer service rep, who takes pride in her work despite being underpaid, who will actually mostly resolve your issue.

Unfortunately for her, this will take 30 minutes, blowing out her KPIs. We'll give her some additional coaching to ensure she never makes that mistake again.

We're in a comfortable oligopoly, and all our "competitors" have exactly the same customer service practices.

Turns out it's more profitable for everyone in our industry to do this than to compete on customer service.

So even if you leave, you'll get the same shabby treatment from them.

You still haven't hung up, so here's some smooth jazz muzak that an intern found on a royalty-free CD. We've compressed the crap out of it, to the point it's now basically static. We'll play it on a loop in the hope you hang up.

Despite all of the above, we'll periodically gaslight you by playing a prerecorded message that says your call is important to us.

You know it's bullshit, we knew it was bullshit when we set it up.

Please hold the line, a customer service representative will be with you shortly.

@daedalus
"Please dial KP 31337 ST on your Blue Box to punch the CEO in the face."

@ideogram @daedalus "Please listen to this annoying message carefully as we changed our menu at least a year ago and won't shut up about it in case you called in over a year ago, and still remember the numbering."

@ideogram @daedalus "we are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls, as we have for the past 5 years, hope you understand we haven't had enough time to adapt"

@raphaelmorgan I am tempted to bill companies for my time testing and diagnosing their systems since they obviously can't be bothered hiring anyone to do it before inflicting them on us.