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0 pointssoco3y ago0 comments

A very annoying "feature" of some of those is making you wait for the human (okay that's acceptable) BUT timing out the session if you don't reply them within a minute or such.

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thombat3y ago

That's the cousin of telephone hold music that interjects with a recording periodically, such as "We apologise for the delay; your call is important to us". All this does is repeatedly grab the caller's attention AND progressively reduce the strength of the grab, so that finally when a real live & hopefully useful human joins the call they may not be noticed. Just give me some crappy Muzak: instrumental without voice, or a gentle periodic beep to confirm the line hadn't dropped. If there is a voice then let it be only to tell me the remodeling queue length, e.g. "You are now eight callers from being served", and only do it upon change of status, not repeating every 30 secs.

iso16313y ago

fading the music and overlaying the status would be better rather than the abrupt cut.

Best of all is the system where they ring you back when they are ready

JadeNB3y ago

> If there is a voice then let it be only to tell me the remodeling queue length, e.g. "You are now eight callers from being served", and only do it upon change of status, not repeating every 30 secs.

I have almost never encountered this while on hold (the closest I have come is the despicable "we are experiencing unusually long hold times", all the time), and it would be so good. What I particularly hate about the repeated announcements of the type you describe is that they are often much louder than the background music, so, not only do they train me not to pay attention, they force me to turn the volume way down, or hold the phone far from my ear, making it still harder to hear when a human comes on the line.

jlokier3y ago

Revolut's in-app chat was like that. You may have to wait over 4 hours, so obviously you're not looking at the screen when a person picks it up. Then when you take a look you find they've replied and then left, and you have to wait for another person on a different shift to pick up your reply.

The trouble is, this was also their only support channel. No phone or web or email.

This went on for nearly 1 week when I was trying to talk to them to unblock my blocked-for-no-reason account a few years ago, and their response times got progressively slower.

In the end a quick message on social media got the account unblocked in 20 minutes. How?!

robertlagrant3y ago

Bad internal structure, is how.

PebblesRox3y ago

The other annoying thing is when the human asks the same questions I already answered to the bot.

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