At the major airline call center where my wife works in baggage
> claims, they tend to start with a story and if not cut off can take
> 5 or 10 minutes telling this story which may or may not, usually
> not, be germane to the reason for the call.
This may be fine for an airline call center, but like all nasty habits it's spread to *everything* without need and no real reason to do it other than they think "commercializing" answering calls makes them more "professional."
This is about just as desirable as those stupid popups you now see on TV programs telling us what's going to be on in the next hour, the next week or the next year. Infiinitely annoying and hardly helpful at all.
And as much as everyone hates auto-attendant systems, including us,
> costs would go through the roof if they staffed for full service
> answering all the time. Calls come in waves. Somewhat predicable but
> with lots of day to day variation.
It's funny that people got along just fine for *years* without auto attendants and being handled by a real person. Auto attendants and IVRs especially when planned badly as some are that force you to go through countless obstacles when you really need to speak to a real person are crazy. The people who design these auto attendants and IVRs should use some common sense. It shouldn't be not obvious that if you want to speak to a real person you should be able to press 0 or just not say anything and time out to a real person. Countless times I've tried to let it time out and instead of being transferred to someone who can help me the designers of the system think it's better to just drop the call. TS for you! If I'm on an IVR and the IVR cannot understand "operator" there's something really wrong in the design of a system.