I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".
It is funny to hear "our wait times are higher than average, your wait is estimated to be zero minutes".
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#Recurring_monolog... , for the probably many people who don't know the reference.)
Health insurance does this for sure. From what I have seen I am convinced they have sophisticated systems to frustrate patients and providers until they give up.
Look up Erlang numbers for call centers. We absolutely know how to calculate required reps for a desired queue dwell. It is 100% a voluntary decision to degrade the Call Center to push people to web based automation. Consider this your proof. We have the equations. Executives make the active decision to not use them/use them to shift cost burden.
t. Helped implement a Call Center before, and we aimed for sub 5 minute queue dwell at all hours of the day.
I wonder how these systems work now...
Erlang's model assumes that the world is static or at least predictable; it doesn't take into account things like the superBowl, a hurricane cancelling 90+% of flights from a major airport, or a much-larger-than-usual number of customers trying to cancel because of a previously-confidential price increase now being publicly announced.