"We are experiencing unusually high call volume..."

[TexasHusker]

If I had a nickel for every time I heard this, I how much could I have saved?

Or how about "Your call is being monitored for quality and training."?

How many times do you call customer "support", spend the first 5 minutes following various nifty prompts, only to figure out there's not one for your issue?

Or you enter in your name, social, address, phone number, etc., and the agent finally answers, and they ask you for all of this information again?

How many times do you spend 15 minutes screwing with all of the prompts, waiting on hold, then the agent finally answers and asks YOU 10 minutes worth of questions before you can ever ask them to help you with your problem, only to find out after all of that, that they actually can't help you?

[james.hendrickson]

Or...why they just can't be like Charles Schwab and have a real, qualified person pick up the phone with no hold time.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Ever notice that Ebay makes it hard to even find a phone number for customer support. Good luck trying to find that phone number.

[kork13]

Ever notice that Ebay makes it hard to even find a phone number for customer support. Good luck trying to find that phone number.

Amazon does (it at least did) the same thing. Getting to a phone number takes at of digging.

[corn18]

Took about 5 sec to find Amazon's customer service number:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=amazon+customer+service+phone+number&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

2 more seconds to get Ebay's:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=amazon+customer+service+phone+number&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[Gailete]

If I had a nickel for every time I heard this, I how much could I have saved?

Or how about "Your call is being monitored for quality and training."?

How many times do you call customer "support", spend the first 5 minutes following various nifty prompts, only to figure out there's not one for your issue?

Or you enter in your name, social, address, phone number, etc., and the agent finally answers, and they ask you for all of this information again?

How many times do you spend 15 minutes screwing with all of the prompts, waiting on hold, then the agent finally answers and asks YOU 10 minutes worth of questions before you can ever ask them to help you with your problem, only to find out after all of that, that they actually can't help you?

Asking for the numbers after already having entered them is my absolute pet peeve of these kind of calls.

The other one is when the CRS is whispering, and you ask them to speak up and they just whisper some more. The other day I called a company and left a message and a whisperer returns the call. Because I can barely hear her the call is taking twice as long as I make her repeat everything at least once. Finally, whatever the call was about was done and I could hang up. Barely a minute or two later I get a call from the same place wanting to see if someone had called me back yet or if they could help. I could tell her the problem had been taken care of but that it had been taken care of by someone that was whispering, and I could barely hear her after repeated attempts to get her to speak louder. The current CSR I could hear with no trouble at all, so no reason for the other to be whispering. I suspect someone is going to be told about how she handles calls was getting complaints. Not that I want to get someone in trouble, but it is like getting a phone call from India about an Amazon problem that I had indicated email me, not call me.

The craziest was getting a call from a CSR after I ordered something from a company. I get this phone call 2-3 days later asking if everything is okay with my order and I tell her I hadn’t gotten the order yet nor did I expect it so soon. The conversation was going nowhere, and I couldn’t figure out why she was wasting my time, so I finally asked her WHY she had called. Her reply – “You wrote down your phone number”! I think that somehow she had missed understanding what her job was supposed to be about!