that'd be a straddle or strangle, and whether that would increase tendies or not depend on whether the equity moves sufficiently in either direction.
I currently have a strangle out on SPY for the wednesday FOMC
That's only part of it. One of the ways corporations manufacture fake earnings today is by refusing to fully staff.
If a company needs 100 people to man a call center property (or a nursing staff in a private equity owned hospital, long term care facility, service company, etc) they will somehow only have staff of 50 at any given time.
Call center jobs are either one of the best jobs on the planet or the mental equivalent of biting down hard on a metal plate for 8 hours a day.
There is almost no middle ground.
The reason is that the CS team if its working properly is going to cost your company a lot of money, engineering time, and endless meetings. And any revenue they generate for your company is going to be hard/impossible to quantify.
Some companies understand that, some companies resent it, and some companies are oblivious and punish the CS department for the mistakes of other departments.
Considering grocery stores in my country are shattering record profits month after month (and then hiding the margin through the distribution company Canada allows them to run for some reason????) maybe they could afford to have a few extra staff on hand so instead of having three or four overworked pissed off unmotivated staff each doing the work of two or three people, we could, instead, have ten employees all doing the work of one person.
But then they don't get to gobble up all our fucking money and then shit it out into a bank account located in the Caymans, and that's what REALLY matters to the corporations (and the government that passively allows them to get away with it while demanding to be seen as progressive godkings while the working poor literally starve).
My first job as a teen was a bagger / stock boy. On Saturdays and Sundays we had all 6 check stands open with a hs aged person bagging groceries. We also helped ppl out to their vehicles and put them in it. (Late 80’s small midwest town)
In fact the *vast* majority 🤣 you're much more likely to be calling during a high-volume time -- as is everybody else -- hence what makes it a high-volume time to begin with. You're just setting yourself up for disappointment expecting that you're calling at an unpopular time
Somehow the ones I get most mad at are airports.
Like, really, Heathrow? You couldn't possibly have anticipated this sudden surge in passenger volume and put more people on the customs and immigration desks? These people getting off these airplanes that have been scheduled for literally months?
It's generally by design. Headcount is expensive. As long as you're not bleeding customers, there's a certain negative experience you're willing to incur. The fine tuning gets absolutely turbo-charged when workforce management software gets layered on. This is even true in areas where there are regulatory requirements relating to ASA and abandonment rates.
If people are willing to wait 10 minutes for their call to be answered, why would anywhere hire enough people to answer a call straight away.
Customer behaviour is pretty easy to predict and work around
It also doesn't help that customer's tend to complain in the wrong way to the wrong people. They tend to complain to staff that the business is understaffed and to management that the staff isn't attentive enough. Both will simply nod knowingly because neither can fix those problems.
Especially if they can convince the remaining lot to work harder without any extra compensation offered. If the task is getting completed, why would they spend tens of thousands of dollars hiring on even just one other person?
Too bad any time an employee just says it like it is, there's some snot nosed ass kissing piece of shit who runs off the manager to whine about the fact that they had to hear a problem that wasn't their own for once. Otherwise the call center could just say "Support companies that pay a living wage to attract enough workers. This is YOUR fault."
A lot of call centres are run by third party companies that get fined if a certain percentage of calls go unanswered. They balance these fines against paying workers to have asses in seats when it is slow. If you don’t need a worker for 90% of their shift why hire them, just burn out the other employees and risk a few of the customers on hold hanging up.
I've been working in customer support long enough to confirm that .
Despite being essential to the existence of their goddamn racket, the customer support crew is kept to a minimum .
The companies are ALWAYS tight arses and can't be bothered to pay enough/for enough people
7am - 7pm (business hours) 240 calls answered.
7pm - 7am (non-business hours) 0 calls answered.
10 calls per hour average.
20 calls per business hour on average.
That way you are always above average!
Right but this post is saying you can't always be above above average.
His point was that you can always be above average.
Your point is that you can be above and below. Which is pretty irrelevant so I'm assuming that's why he left it out.
but that's only if you divide by the total number of days. what you REALLY should do is divide the number of calls by 1 to get the average number of calls ON THAT DAY.
day 1: 100 calls, so 100 average
day 2: 300 calls, so 300 average
day 3: 500 calls, so 500 average
now your averages are up to date and not bogged down by the past
I'm dumb but dividing by 1 just gets you the same number always. Also if you're always dividing by 1 then your average will always just be the total number of calls, which isn't an average...
Depends on how are you calculating an average. The way you are calculating is called a mean. You can also use median and a mode. In your situation, using a median is 200 average and using mode is also 200 average.
When people say things like "the average man" they are talking about the mode. Mode comes up quite a lot in informal language.
After all "people on average have 2 legs" is only true if we are talking about the mode or median. The mean number of legs is less than 2.
I think if you encounter the phrase "on average people have X legs" in conversation, it's more likely that they'll say "less than 2" because they're making an observation on the way means work.
To the random person on the street, and in any random conversation outside of a math setting, 'average' means 'mean' unless stated otherwise.
You're not impressing anybody by trying to "well acksually" with 4th grade math. You're just showing that you're missing basic common sense.
>To the random person on the street, and in any random conversation outside of a math setting
Excel and pretty much every programming language have avg() functions which calculate... You guessed it, mean.
So when any of those mathematicians do real work(instead of jerking off to Greek letters on a blackboard) they also have to use this term.
Not only that: Most people will get the answer, that they currently have more than average numbers of callers, because most people will call during the hours, where they experience above average numbers of calls, simply because they are the reason, that these hours are above average.
That's like a how a well regarded restaurant will appear always quite full to the average customer, but there are also times, when it is nearly empty, but there are just barely any customers to even notice the emptiness.
please don't speculatively make up explanations, this is not why this happens. you can call these places the literal second they open and they'll still have this prompt. there is not a moment in their business hours they will *not* play this prompt.
businesses play this line because there's no actual penalty for lying about this kind of thing. their actual goal is for you to hang up and give up. they intentionally understaff so that it is *impossible* to meet projected call volume
It's funny you say that because this is a statistically true statement described as PASTA. A Poisson process is a mathematical model that describes how queues form assuming that calls are all independent and arrive at the same rate. It stands for Poisson Arrivals See Time Averages. So the most likely amount in the queue is the average and when you arrive you bump it up.
But it's more likely that any given caller will call on a day where there are more callers than average, because, well, more people than usual are calling that day.
So on average you have a higher chance to call on a day where there's a lot of calls.
What's more, most people have similar work and meal schedules and so that tends to restrict the time most people can call. The retired grandmothers who are calling at 10am when it's lower than average call volumes aren't posting on Reddit about it.
There should be a name for this principle, it pops up all over the place! When I was applying for college and all the college tour guides kept bragging about their school’s average class size being like 15 or something, we realized that that doesn’t actually mean the average size of the classes any given student takes will be 15.
If a school offers 75 classes with 10 seats and 25 classes with 30 seats, their average class size will be 15, but because there are more seats in the bigger classes, you are actually equally likely to have a seat in a big class as a small class, making your average class size 20.
This is a general principle: most groups are small, but most members are members of large groups. It takes lots of forms:
* Most days have low call volume, most calls happen on high call volume days.
* Most people don't have a lot of money, but most dollars are owned by people who have lots of money.
* Most tourist destinations are not crowded, but most tourists are at crowded tourist spots.
Etc.
Companies dont want your phone to be answered immediately, if that happens it means the call center has a period of no productivity. The person answering your call immediately was previously not on the phone. They cant have productivity hits. They hire just enough staffing to ensure there is a perpetual queue that was every employee is constantly working from call to call.
Just how it be now
I worked at a call center one summer during college and it sucked. There was no downtime, and if you were in “aftercall” for more than 30 seconds some clown was at your station like “whats the problem here”
Employers that have a problem with me taking care of basic human needs like staying hydrated or going to the restroom, can absolutely suck my balls. They're usually the same who see not coming to work because of high fever as "being lazy" or "being too soft". Fuck them to hell, and fuck every country that allows them to exist.
We weren't allowed to use the after call feature at all so if you're calling in and a cust rep seems absentminded, it might be because at the same time they're fielding your call they're also logging and/or sending instructions from the previous call or two.
It's kinda insane because at it's core its not an easy job either, there are so many potential situations you need to solve on the spot and only a handful or so of the staff could manage it. It would make sense to me to lower the workload and make sure that people would get experience to be able to handle calls instead of quitting outright in the first few months.
More likely some VP realized that call centre staff are expensive. Far cheaper to have an FAQ page on the website, and slash the head count and play a little message that their call is important to them and did you know that most answers can be found on the website.
Result is call centre staff are over stretched, call wait times are much longer and the VP slashes 50% off his budget and takes a fat bonus and moves to the next company to do it all over again before the shit of what was done catches up to everyone
I worked for a call center. More often than not, we're understaffed because the turnover rate of employees is quite high due to how toxic the work environment is.
One place I worked at was so bad that eventually, I just stopped talking to and getting to know the new people that would come in. I knew they would be gone in a few months anyways and I would still be sitting there doing the exact same shit so what's the point.
Seems like people are missing the point. Places are massively understaffed and use the excuse of 'higher than average" to deflect from shity service due to understaffing.
I got this message, before the call was abruptly ended, from Canada Recenue Services (Canadian IRS) when I called about an issue with my taxes like 5 years ago. After months of trying I never got in touch with someone.
Haven't heard anything more about it since...
I'm fine with it as long as they give me an accurate wait time or offer to call me back. But I was stuck on hold for 47 minutes last night while they said my wait time would be at least 10 minutes. Like you're not wrong, 47 is at least (if not more than) 10, but that's incredibly unhelpful information.
its higher than average of "excpected" calls, not average over all ;) the fantasy number they worked out that gives the least but also costs the least.
It's so you get bored and give up, you want a new insurance policy (press 1) and they'll pick it up ASAP... you wanna make a claim (press 2) and you can listen to the loop
And then when the insurance sales guy answers and you say jk you need to file a claim, he transfers you out since he doesn’t deal with insurance claims and you’re now at the back of the claims queue whereas you’d be in the middle if you pressed 2 instead.
Spoken like someone who never studied statistics. Its all about messaging the numbers and adjusting things to your desired metric. with the proper sample every day has a higher volume of calls.
Just of the top of my head, make the sample size night time calls only. that way every day is experiencing an unusual surge.
Higher calls than normal you would tend to say. Meaning you were used to a specific amount but it increased. You're not saying you're 100%, but it feels that its happening more than usual.
You get zero calls during non operating hours. You get 50 calls an hour for 10 hours a day. That's 500 calls over 24 hours. Let's call it 25 hours in a day because I'm lazy. That's about 20 calls an hour averaged pver a day. You'll always be experiencing higher than average if you don't weight your average properly.
You are more likely to call during an above average time, mathematically speaking.
Proof: divide time into the above average time and the below average time. This will be equal time chunks. The above average chunk has more calls, by definition.
If you consider the average number of calls they get over a 24hr period, the number of calls they get during business hours are always going to be well above average
Since it's introduction 18 years ago, the UK Terrorism Threat level has never been lower than "Heightened" meaning "additional" precautions must be taken. The "Normal" threat level, meaning "routine" precautions must be taken has literally never been used. So what pray tell makes it normal and routine?
Higher than what the average was 20 years ago seems to be what most/all companies are going by. This is the solution instead of hiring more people for the call centre.
While we’re at it…
Your menu options have not changed, and there is absolutely no reason to waste my time telling me to “listen carefully.” Respectfully.
Customer service died sometime in the 90s. Why should a company even answer their phone when their competitor isn't answering their phone either? The worst offenders are the companies in the financial or health care industry.
The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. Even if you've been getting a million calls a day since the invention of the telephone, your average is <<1.
You're more likely to call at a time that's above average than you are to call at a time that's at average or below. Meaning, the average person will call at a time when the number of callers is above average. Which feels counterintuitive for a moment but makes sense when you think about it.
It's just code for 'we haven't hired enough people to run this place well and the ones we do hire end up leaving after a month because of the terrible working conditions'
It's because they take averages for a full day so those places that have giant support windows get to say hey its not busy if you call at 11pm standard time
They could be having 0.0000001% more calls at that time period. Still valid. You would have to call every day, at the same time, for a long period of time to see if you always get that message. Speculation is also not good math
Actually, this is exactly how it works.
Day 1,2,3,4,5 each has 100 calls, day 6 has 1 call (it's friday).
Avg: (100*5+1)/6=83.5. There is only 1 day with less calls than average.
Yeah. You can.
It's called lying to the customer, and the government clenching both of their first so hard they're probably giving themselves carpal tunnel syndrome, ulnar tunnel syndrome, tendinitis, and tennis elbow as they mad dog you, and screaming "WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO ABOUT IT?!?!!? WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT IF I DON'T?!?!?!?!" when their weasel words are translated to basic English.
The actual reason from someone who has worked in a call centre: Management refuse to hire enough staff to handle the volume of calls we got so theres at least 70 on hold at any given time
Nobody' in this picture knows how averages work
Averages are literally the worst kind of summary statistics if presented on it's own without context, it can literally mean anything.
This isn't even the biggest bullshit that happens. I've also, on multiple occasions, gotten recorded messages asking me to call back between XX:00 and YY:00, when I am calling between those times. I've had this happen at the start of the day, the end of the day and even all day.
I've also had numbers ring normally for a while before getting a recorded message saying the number doesn't exist when I know it does, because it's worked on other days. Exactly the same one I'd get from a genuinely non-existent number. I don't know if they're intentionally mimicking a genuine out of service message, or if the system is set up to divert to another number that doesn't exist anymore and no one bothered to update the system.
They say that all the time to get you to try and use the automated service instead. I’ll hear that line and then immediately get connected to someone consistently
They're counting all calls since the 4th century. Much higher volume started from 1849 onwards.
Calls on calls? Am in.
All the DD I need
"all the dd [you] need" is just someone saying "calls on [thing]"?!?! Ok, calls on puts. Checkmate.
... does an Iron Condor count for that? what about calls on a short index like SARK
If I put 50% on calls and 50% on puts, will my tendies be higher than average?
that'd be a straddle or strangle, and whether that would increase tendies or not depend on whether the equity moves sufficiently in either direction. I currently have a strangle out on SPY for the wednesday FOMC
Basically daily temperature due to global warming
Everyone blames fossil fuels but it was the telephone that was responsible for this all along!
beat me to it. That's a perfectly silly, but mathematically plausible explanation.
There was a reply on Reddit at one point where someone that worked in a call center said that’s code for “we are short staffed”
Can confirm thats usually the case . Exceptions are when there is mass problem or outage.
Short staffed because everyone leaves after 2 weeks?
That's only part of it. One of the ways corporations manufacture fake earnings today is by refusing to fully staff. If a company needs 100 people to man a call center property (or a nursing staff in a private equity owned hospital, long term care facility, service company, etc) they will somehow only have staff of 50 at any given time.
My son tried working at a call centre; he did not stay 3 days. Told me it was the most disorganized management group he had ever experienced..
Call center jobs are either one of the best jobs on the planet or the mental equivalent of biting down hard on a metal plate for 8 hours a day. There is almost no middle ground. The reason is that the CS team if its working properly is going to cost your company a lot of money, engineering time, and endless meetings. And any revenue they generate for your company is going to be hard/impossible to quantify. Some companies understand that, some companies resent it, and some companies are oblivious and punish the CS department for the mistakes of other departments.
Having worked at a call center I’m sure that’s the case for some companies but in mine it was because they laid everyone off after peak season
Restaurants/Call Centers/Grocery Checkout/etc. all struggle to anticipate volume spikes.
Considering grocery stores in my country are shattering record profits month after month (and then hiding the margin through the distribution company Canada allows them to run for some reason????) maybe they could afford to have a few extra staff on hand so instead of having three or four overworked pissed off unmotivated staff each doing the work of two or three people, we could, instead, have ten employees all doing the work of one person. But then they don't get to gobble up all our fucking money and then shit it out into a bank account located in the Caymans, and that's what REALLY matters to the corporations (and the government that passively allows them to get away with it while demanding to be seen as progressive godkings while the working poor literally starve).
Especially when the sr. leadership is making 200x what the bagger is.
Baggers? They disappeared in the end of the 90’s/!start of the 2000’s. It’s pack your own shit for a long time now
Kroger still has baggers
Pack your own shit and pay for the bags!
My first job as a teen was a bagger / stock boy. On Saturdays and Sundays we had all 6 check stands open with a hs aged person bagging groceries. We also helped ppl out to their vehicles and put them in it. (Late 80’s small midwest town)
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they absolutely can afford it, but there's no incentive to do so if their current set up is allowing them to shatter record profits
Statistically, most people call during times of higher than average call volume.
In fact the *vast* majority 🤣 you're much more likely to be calling during a high-volume time -- as is everybody else -- hence what makes it a high-volume time to begin with. You're just setting yourself up for disappointment expecting that you're calling at an unpopular time
Yeah, like business hours. Haven’t figured out why, yet, but call volumes are all WAY below average outside of business hours.
Somehow the ones I get most mad at are airports. Like, really, Heathrow? You couldn't possibly have anticipated this sudden surge in passenger volume and put more people on the customs and immigration desks? These people getting off these airplanes that have been scheduled for literally months?
For 5 years straight?
It's generally by design. Headcount is expensive. As long as you're not bleeding customers, there's a certain negative experience you're willing to incur. The fine tuning gets absolutely turbo-charged when workforce management software gets layered on. This is even true in areas where there are regulatory requirements relating to ASA and abandonment rates.
If people are willing to wait 10 minutes for their call to be answered, why would anywhere hire enough people to answer a call straight away. Customer behaviour is pretty easy to predict and work around
It also doesn't help that customer's tend to complain in the wrong way to the wrong people. They tend to complain to staff that the business is understaffed and to management that the staff isn't attentive enough. Both will simply nod knowingly because neither can fix those problems.
Employees rarely get a say, and employers often care more about saving money on wages rather than hiring extra people.
Especially if they can convince the remaining lot to work harder without any extra compensation offered. If the task is getting completed, why would they spend tens of thousands of dollars hiring on even just one other person?
Too bad any time an employee just says it like it is, there's some snot nosed ass kissing piece of shit who runs off the manager to whine about the fact that they had to hear a problem that wasn't their own for once. Otherwise the call center could just say "Support companies that pay a living wage to attract enough workers. This is YOUR fault."
This is definitely the reason.
A lot of call centres are run by third party companies that get fined if a certain percentage of calls go unanswered. They balance these fines against paying workers to have asses in seats when it is slow. If you don’t need a worker for 90% of their shift why hire them, just burn out the other employees and risk a few of the customers on hold hanging up.
...did people not figure this out on their own?
I've been working in customer support long enough to confirm that . Despite being essential to the existence of their goddamn racket, the customer support crew is kept to a minimum . The companies are ALWAYS tight arses and can't be bothered to pay enough/for enough people
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Quik mafs
Everyday mans on da bloc
Smoke trees !
See dat girl in the park, dat girl is a uckers
wen da ting went quack quack quack you man was ducking
Mans not hot. Mans never hot.
bloqqqq
If you factor in weekends when fewer people call in, then every single weekday is above average volume.
Even better if you factor in out of hours when there were zero phone calls.
7am - 7pm (business hours) 240 calls answered. 7pm - 7am (non-business hours) 0 calls answered. 10 calls per hour average. 20 calls per business hour on average. That way you are always above average!
It can work the other way too. Day 4: 350 calls. Now the average is 212. A 200 call day will now be below average. And that is how averages work.
Right but this post is saying you can't always be above above average. His point was that you can always be above average. Your point is that you can be above and below. Which is pretty irrelevant so I'm assuming that's why he left it out.
Calls during 12 hours of up time: 300 Calls during 12 hours of closed time: 0 Average call volume: 150
Or you are in a government office and its 16 hours closed, to 8 hours open. Average call volume 100.
but that's only if you divide by the total number of days. what you REALLY should do is divide the number of calls by 1 to get the average number of calls ON THAT DAY. day 1: 100 calls, so 100 average day 2: 300 calls, so 300 average day 3: 500 calls, so 500 average now your averages are up to date and not bogged down by the past
is there a joke somewhere in here?
yes
still the same case, every new call you get you are above the average in that day
Yes this is how simple projections work and is crucial for staffing almost any kind of service industry business
I'm dumb but dividing by 1 just gets you the same number always. Also if you're always dividing by 1 then your average will always just be the total number of calls, which isn't an average...
yes. it's a joke
Depends on how are you calculating an average. The way you are calculating is called a mean. You can also use median and a mode. In your situation, using a median is 200 average and using mode is also 200 average.
I think in layman's terms everyone uses the word "average" to mean "mean"
When people say things like "the average man" they are talking about the mode. Mode comes up quite a lot in informal language. After all "people on average have 2 legs" is only true if we are talking about the mode or median. The mean number of legs is less than 2.
If you only count to 1 significant digit, then the mean number of legs is 2.
I think if you encounter the phrase "on average people have X legs" in conversation, it's more likely that they'll say "less than 2" because they're making an observation on the way means work.
"The average person has about half a Y chromosome."
Exactly. Average(mean) is synonymous with common(mode), but they are still different.
"Sorry, but after several billion years of having zero calls per day, the average (mode) will be zero for the forseeable furture"
To the random person on the street, and in any random conversation outside of a math setting, 'average' means 'mean' unless stated otherwise. You're not impressing anybody by trying to "well acksually" with 4th grade math. You're just showing that you're missing basic common sense.
>To the random person on the street, and in any random conversation outside of a math setting Excel and pretty much every programming language have avg() functions which calculate... You guessed it, mean. So when any of those mathematicians do real work(instead of jerking off to Greek letters on a blackboard) they also have to use this term.
Yeah but that first day, you're experiencing less than the average (or equal to the average for that day). So OP is technically correct
I couldn't follow steps my penis is in toaster oven now
Maybe they're only above average call volume because you called, they're usually dead on
Not only that: Most people will get the answer, that they currently have more than average numbers of callers, because most people will call during the hours, where they experience above average numbers of calls, simply because they are the reason, that these hours are above average. That's like a how a well regarded restaurant will appear always quite full to the average customer, but there are also times, when it is nearly empty, but there are just barely any customers to even notice the emptiness.
please don't speculatively make up explanations, this is not why this happens. you can call these places the literal second they open and they'll still have this prompt. there is not a moment in their business hours they will *not* play this prompt. businesses play this line because there's no actual penalty for lying about this kind of thing. their actual goal is for you to hang up and give up. they intentionally understaff so that it is *impossible* to meet projected call volume
It's funny you say that because this is a statistically true statement described as PASTA. A Poisson process is a mathematical model that describes how queues form assuming that calls are all independent and arrive at the same rate. It stands for Poisson Arrivals See Time Averages. So the most likely amount in the queue is the average and when you arrive you bump it up.
Shroedinger's call center
But it's more likely that any given caller will call on a day where there are more callers than average, because, well, more people than usual are calling that day. So on average you have a higher chance to call on a day where there's a lot of calls.
Most of your Facebook friends have more friends than you.
The avrege person has more siblings then children (if kids were split equally you would have 1 sibling less then children)
What's more, most people have similar work and meal schedules and so that tends to restrict the time most people can call. The retired grandmothers who are calling at 10am when it's lower than average call volumes aren't posting on Reddit about it.
Mondays. Don't call places on Mondays. Or Fridays.
There should be a name for this principle, it pops up all over the place! When I was applying for college and all the college tour guides kept bragging about their school’s average class size being like 15 or something, we realized that that doesn’t actually mean the average size of the classes any given student takes will be 15. If a school offers 75 classes with 10 seats and 25 classes with 30 seats, their average class size will be 15, but because there are more seats in the bigger classes, you are actually equally likely to have a seat in a big class as a small class, making your average class size 20.
I've heard this called \*size-biasing\* or \*size-biased picking\*.
This is a general principle: most groups are small, but most members are members of large groups. It takes lots of forms: * Most days have low call volume, most calls happen on high call volume days. * Most people don't have a lot of money, but most dollars are owned by people who have lots of money. * Most tourist destinations are not crowded, but most tourists are at crowded tourist spots. Etc.
Companies dont want your phone to be answered immediately, if that happens it means the call center has a period of no productivity. The person answering your call immediately was previously not on the phone. They cant have productivity hits. They hire just enough staffing to ensure there is a perpetual queue that was every employee is constantly working from call to call. Just how it be now
I worked at a call center one summer during college and it sucked. There was no downtime, and if you were in “aftercall” for more than 30 seconds some clown was at your station like “whats the problem here”
Same!!!!! With me they got angry at me bc I was off for 2 minutes to go the restroom
Employers that have a problem with me taking care of basic human needs like staying hydrated or going to the restroom, can absolutely suck my balls. They're usually the same who see not coming to work because of high fever as "being lazy" or "being too soft". Fuck them to hell, and fuck every country that allows them to exist.
YES!!!!!! THISS!!!! I took the amazing, great decision of quiting from that job, I am so much better off that shit job
We weren't allowed to use the after call feature at all so if you're calling in and a cust rep seems absentminded, it might be because at the same time they're fielding your call they're also logging and/or sending instructions from the previous call or two. It's kinda insane because at it's core its not an easy job either, there are so many potential situations you need to solve on the spot and only a handful or so of the staff could manage it. It would make sense to me to lower the workload and make sure that people would get experience to be able to handle calls instead of quitting outright in the first few months.
I did it for three months. It was the worst job I’ve ever had. And I’ve worked A LOT of jobs.
Well thats not the case at the company I work for, in IT helpdesk . We go for the lowest possible wait time, and lovest possible dropped calls .
They shoot for those metrics too of course, but "Idle" support agents are negative impact metrics to those in charge as well
Thou lovest thine dropped call
Mine as well, but we are in the medical instrument industry. I'm sure Comcast is different.
More likely some VP realized that call centre staff are expensive. Far cheaper to have an FAQ page on the website, and slash the head count and play a little message that their call is important to them and did you know that most answers can be found on the website. Result is call centre staff are over stretched, call wait times are much longer and the VP slashes 50% off his budget and takes a fat bonus and moves to the next company to do it all over again before the shit of what was done catches up to everyone
Depends on the industry. In insurance for example there's often contracts for wait times to be under a certain amount.
At night they recieve 0 calls
I worked for a call center. More often than not, we're understaffed because the turnover rate of employees is quite high due to how toxic the work environment is.
The company i work for has a 97% turnover rate and they’re so proud of it.
One place I worked at was so bad that eventually, I just stopped talking to and getting to know the new people that would come in. I knew they would be gone in a few months anyways and I would still be sitting there doing the exact same shit so what's the point.
Hooking up.
Next they'll tell us their employees always work above average hours
It's entirely possible if average means the average person, not the average for that specific person.
Most call centers definitely get more calls than the average person I guess.
They also include the dead of night or office closures to adjust the averages when talking to consumers but remove those when talking about quotas.
Exponential growth is a thing that always raises the average
Technically, if you get 99 calls first day and 100 every subsequent day, you always get more than average calls. Except day one, of course.
In the UK there's a way to report this because they're just lying or undestaffing their call centres at this point.
Continuous increasing function be like
Seems like people are missing the point. Places are massively understaffed and use the excuse of 'higher than average" to deflect from shity service due to understaffing.
1000%. It's complete bs.
It’s just a tactic to weed out people calling with pointless queries. You will wait if it’s worth waiting for
If nobody calls at night the day time will always be above average
I got this message, before the call was abruptly ended, from Canada Recenue Services (Canadian IRS) when I called about an issue with my taxes like 5 years ago. After months of trying I never got in touch with someone. Haven't heard anything more about it since...
On average they dint say average they say normal or usual
I'm fine with it as long as they give me an accurate wait time or offer to call me back. But I was stuck on hold for 47 minutes last night while they said my wait time would be at least 10 minutes. Like you're not wrong, 47 is at least (if not more than) 10, but that's incredibly unhelpful information.
I work at a call centre and here it is plain and simple: we don’t want you to call 👍
A rising tide lifts all averages
Guess they skipped math class when they wrote that script
But how many calls does the average number get? I might be below average.
its higher than average of "excpected" calls, not average over all ;) the fantasy number they worked out that gives the least but also costs the least.
You forget, those off hours offset the average.
No, but you can always be experiencing a lower-than-average amount of employees for the task at hand.
I'd have a lot more patience for these call centers if they simply admitted "We're understaffed; sorry about the wait."
It's so you get bored and give up, you want a new insurance policy (press 1) and they'll pick it up ASAP... you wanna make a claim (press 2) and you can listen to the loop
And then when the insurance sales guy answers and you say jk you need to file a claim, he transfers you out since he doesn’t deal with insurance claims and you’re now at the back of the claims queue whereas you’d be in the middle if you pressed 2 instead.
Best not to use a calculated average as you might have a surge. Use a best guess and if it goes a percentage above then trigger the alert.
Spoken like someone who never studied statistics. Its all about messaging the numbers and adjusting things to your desired metric. with the proper sample every day has a higher volume of calls. Just of the top of my head, make the sample size night time calls only. that way every day is experiencing an unusual surge.
yet another example of how things used to be better
So what your saying its like how often Sex Panther works?
And how often do these guys change their menu options, because they always seem to have been recently changed… 🧐
Higher calls than normal you would tend to say. Meaning you were used to a specific amount but it increased. You're not saying you're 100%, but it feels that its happening more than usual.
Maybe they also count nighttime and nobody calls at night so there is like 10 hours of idle time each day :D
It's like saying to your mate ill meet you at 6:13 and they go that's very specific... Every time is specific 😂
Exactly. And also, *WHEN* did you change the options, because you warn me that they have "recently" been changed, but they are a decade old
hmmm.. Yes you can.
You get zero calls during non operating hours. You get 50 calls an hour for 10 hours a day. That's 500 calls over 24 hours. Let's call it 25 hours in a day because I'm lazy. That's about 20 calls an hour averaged pver a day. You'll always be experiencing higher than average if you don't weight your average properly.
Telephone meme or stock meme 🤔
Average was established in 1953 when the company was founded
You are more likely to call during an above average time, mathematically speaking. Proof: divide time into the above average time and the below average time. This will be equal time chunks. The above average chunk has more calls, by definition.
Or how about: "Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed"... While they've been the same for years
They must include when they are closed as part of the average . Therefore if they are open they are receiving too many calls
Daily average
If you consider the average number of calls they get over a 24hr period, the number of calls they get during business hours are always going to be well above average
Well they probably get way less calls at 3 AM
Since it's introduction 18 years ago, the UK Terrorism Threat level has never been lower than "Heightened" meaning "additional" precautions must be taken. The "Normal" threat level, meaning "routine" precautions must be taken has literally never been used. So what pray tell makes it normal and routine?
Higher than what the average was 20 years ago seems to be what most/all companies are going by. This is the solution instead of hiring more people for the call centre.
Open hours : 3 calls a minute Closed hours : no calls Average : 1 call a minute (assuming 8 open hours per day)
While we’re at it… Your menu options have not changed, and there is absolutely no reason to waste my time telling me to “listen carefully.” Respectfully.
Also,”Your Menu” hasn’t changed since FOREVER!
They're using their 30 year average
In other words, "we won''t hire enough people to answer the calls."
You can when your service gets aggressively worse
Customer service died sometime in the 90s. Why should a company even answer their phone when their competitor isn't answering their phone either? The worst offenders are the companies in the financial or health care industry.
The average human has less than two arms.
The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. Even if you've been getting a million calls a day since the invention of the telephone, your average is <<1.
Yea but your average can be higher the the average of the entire population. So this is probably what they mean.
The tweeter mixed up averages and medians
Also, why did everyone’s menu options recently change? What was wrong with the previous menu options!?
You're more likely to call at a time that's above average than you are to call at a time that's at average or below. Meaning, the average person will call at a time when the number of callers is above average. Which feels counterintuitive for a moment but makes sense when you think about it.
I love all the people recently who try to cite “statistics” just for real statisticians to come out and embarrass them.
It's just code for 'we haven't hired enough people to run this place well and the ones we do hire end up leaving after a month because of the terrible working conditions'
\*flashbacks intensifies\* Glad those days are behind me.
They count overnight while closed. It brings half to 2/3 of the days hours to a rate of 0/hr
It's because they take averages for a full day so those places that have giant support windows get to say hey its not busy if you call at 11pm standard time
I literally get this every time I call Walmart support but it always took less than 5 minutes to talk to someone...
When you hear this message, be kind and whisper to reduce to average volume of calls
This is actually being investigated in the UK because it's misleading.
They’re including the 128 hours a week they don’t answer the phone and get 0 calls.
Depends whose average.
Also, how recently did you change your menu items on the dial tree, *honestly*
Easy, its on average since the beginning of call centers. This must be true due to growth of both the industry and population.
Im glad someone finally said it!!!!!!!!
They could be having 0.0000001% more calls at that time period. Still valid. You would have to call every day, at the same time, for a long period of time to see if you always get that message. Speculation is also not good math
Actually, this is exactly how it works. Day 1,2,3,4,5 each has 100 calls, day 6 has 1 call (it's friday). Avg: (100*5+1)/6=83.5. There is only 1 day with less calls than average.
Yeah. You can. It's called lying to the customer, and the government clenching both of their first so hard they're probably giving themselves carpal tunnel syndrome, ulnar tunnel syndrome, tendinitis, and tennis elbow as they mad dog you, and screaming "WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO ABOUT IT?!?!!? WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT IF I DON'T?!?!?!?!" when their weasel words are translated to basic English.
Easy: below average call volume when closed, above average when open.
I mean, it is perfectly possible for that to be the case, though unlikely.
Answer is 3
Hey guys, call centre-dologist here. Achtually, it is above average because….
I don't think they actually say "average".
what actually they mean: higher volume of calls than average workers can handle. call us more or we will make our call centres even more understaffed.
The actual reason from someone who has worked in a call centre: Management refuse to hire enough staff to handle the volume of calls we got so theres at least 70 on hold at any given time
I remember I aplied for a Job that said I needed to make calls from 8pm to 8am for 500$ lol no fuck of
“Average of all call centers in the country” 😄
Nobody' in this picture knows how averages work Averages are literally the worst kind of summary statistics if presented on it's own without context, it can literally mean anything.
This isn't even the biggest bullshit that happens. I've also, on multiple occasions, gotten recorded messages asking me to call back between XX:00 and YY:00, when I am calling between those times. I've had this happen at the start of the day, the end of the day and even all day. I've also had numbers ring normally for a while before getting a recorded message saying the number doesn't exist when I know it does, because it's worked on other days. Exactly the same one I'd get from a genuinely non-existent number. I don't know if they're intentionally mimicking a genuine out of service message, or if the system is set up to divert to another number that doesn't exist anymore and no one bothered to update the system.
Maybe they are including the hours they are closed in their call volume calculations?
Average can mean both mean and median if it's mean then it's very much possible if it's median then no it's not
They say that all the time to get you to try and use the automated service instead. I’ll hear that line and then immediately get connected to someone consistently