>The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading.
A law is being debated in my EU country where companies can't put customers on hold more than 10 minutes before reaching an actual human for support. I hope it passes and that it spreads across the union and also applies to tech companies as well.
That's going to be spicy - things like product launches often have 100-1000x the call volume than a typical day, so training up 100x workers temporarily is going to suck - I used to train apple's tech support.
I prefer that feature massively. Being on hold sucks, you can't fully commit to doing another task because you need to listen out for the fuzzy elevator music to switch to a human voice. Even worse when the fuzzy music switches to a recorded human voice every 30 seconds to remind you you're still on hold.
Having a call back means I can forget about it and go on with my day until they call me.
...I wonder if there's a meaningful way to prevent companies from saying they're going to do this, and then just "losing" 80% of the callbacks they're supposed to give. Or giving them at 1AM (hey, it's 10:30AM in Mumbai where the off-hours call center is!).
Waiting for a callback is unquestionably way better than waiting on hold, but I would still need to make sure I'm in a position to be taking that call and actually handling whatever it requires at any given time during the waiting period, so things like going shopping or being in a place with poor cell signal (like my office!) aren't good options—and what happens if I'm not available the moment they call? Can they just say "oh, well, couldn't reach customer" and force me to start the process again?
> Already feels like they can work around that by having the "Don't wait on hold, we'll call you back when an agent is ready" feature.
I tried this recently with an airline (AA). The next callback time was like 10 hours later. A bit crazy but ok I took it.
When the time came I get a call. From an agent? Nope. From the same automated system which cheerfully announced this was my callback, now please wait for the next available agent! After being on hold for 10+ minutes I gave up.
A law is being debated in my EU country where companies can't put customers on hold more than 10 minutes before reaching an actual human for support. I hope it passes and that it spreads across the union and also applies to tech companies as well.