Over the Easter long-weekend, I needed to change a booking I had made with a large company in the entertainment industry. Their website helpfully directed me to an online form to request the change, which I filled in. I received an email confirmation that was a few paragraphs long, of which the last line noted that the organisation was running a smaller-than-usual number of staff over the long-weekend, therefore if my change needed to be processed within two days, I should contact the venue directly.
Feeling relieved that I had noticed the final sentence at all, I dialled the venue immediately. Then I waited on hold for 25 minutes, listening to offensively banal hold music interspersed with occasional reassurances that my call was important to them and suggesting that I might prefer to contact them via their website. At the 25-minute mark, a recorded voice said “You have now been on hold for 25 minutes. In five minutes, this call will end to avoid further delays.”
I held for a further five minutes, expecting the opportunity to record a message requesting a call back. At precisely 30 minutes, however, the call was simply disconnected. It’s true that this relieved me of any further delays. It was also true that I’d made precisely zero progress on my quest to change my booking.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered seemingly impenetrable walls erected by big organisations in the name of ’customer service.’ When I was a baby bureaucrat I once worked in a government organisation that sent callers to voicemail after 30 minutes on hold. After a while, the voicemails started backing up and proved increasingly costly to respond to individually. The manager’s response was to change the system so that callers simply heard an engaged tone after 30 minutes. Every day hundreds of disadvantaged people called this targeted government service and waited on hold for half an hour, only to be disconnected and deliberately ignored.
I can think of a few reasons why these processes come about, but none of them seem satisfactory. Nothing can quite explain how so many people decide to make these rules and have so many others blindly follow them.
