Musings about phone queues

This article is about the automated call queues you’re likely to find yourself dealing with before you actually get to speak to someone if you phone a large organisation. They may be a necessary evil, but there are certainly ways that they could be improved. Here are some suggestions:

Get me into the queue as quickly as possible

Do give me a quick “Thank you for calling [organisation name]”, to confirm I’ve got the number right.

Don’t have any more pre-recorded audio before I hear the initial menu options. If you must tell me about your unusually high call volumes, or your current special offers, do it while I’m waiting in the queue, not before. But preferably don’t do it at all.

Do put the most popular menu options first, to minimise the time it takes on average to get to the desired one.

Don’t have menus that go many levels deep for no reason. “For X or Y, press 3” is silly if the next question is going to be “For X, press 1; for Y, press 2”.

Even better, do tell me the menu options in advance if possible (put them on your website, for example) so I already know what buttons I have to press.

Be considerate with generic information

Don’t tell me you are “experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment” unless that’s actually true.

Don’t use your phone queue as an advertising channel. It’s annoying, and comes across really badly if I’m phoning because I already have a problem.

If you are a medical provider, really don’t use your phone queue as an advertising channel. Do you think someone calling a dentist, presumably already aware that their teeth need attention, really wants to be subject to attempts to convince them that their teeth need whitening (presumably at great cost)?

Don’t tell me how amazing your website is. If you want to use a website, the only reason to phone an organisation with a website is that the website doesn’t actually do what you need it to. If you don’t want to use a website, a recording telling you about a website is hardly going to change your mind.

Make the wait bearable…

Do give me an idea of how long the queue is. “There are current 12 callers ahead of you. The estimated waiting time is 10 minutes.”

Don’t use text-to-speech. It gets really grating to listen to after a while. You don’t necessarily need a professional voiceover artist, but get a real human to record the on-hold messages.

That said, keep the messages direct, and don’t try to make the computer sound “friendly” or “cute”. You’re fooling nobody: we all know it’s a computer, so it feels grating if it doesn’t behave like one.

Also, at one point, a particular large organisation here in the UK used rhyming couplets in their phone system - don’t do that, obviously.

Do choose decent hold music. Clearly everyone has their own taste, but some pieces work better played over a phone line than others. In general, if it’s particularly loud or there are many instruments at once, it will sound like a distorted mess. (I think anyone setting up a phone system should call it themselves and check the music sounds OK over the phone - and if going through the menus to get to the music is too time-consuming, fix the menus first!)

If possible, do give some sort of warning a short time before the call is answered. Suddenly going from music to someone answering is annoying because I might put the phone on loudspeaker mode and go off and do something else. I don’t just sit with the phone next to my face listening to the hold music indefinitely.

Don’t abruptly cut off the music to play a pre-recorded message - that just makes me think someone has answered the call. Reduce the volume and talk over it, or wait until the end of the track.

Do warn me if the lines are closing soon and tell me when I should call back. I don’t want to wait for ages and then suddenly be disconnected.

… or let me skip it altogether

Do have high-quality online information to minimise the number of phone calls I need to make.

Do offer to call me back rather than having me sit in the queue. It means I can go off and do something else, as long as I keep the phone with me. It’s also helpful for people who pay per minute for phone calls, as they aren’t wasting money to listen to music.

On the other hand, don’t offer to call me back before I know how long the queue actually is. If it’s only a few minutes I’ll usually just sit in it.

Do let me join the queue and then trigger the call-back later if I get bored. (“To leave the queue and request a call-back instead, press * at any time.” would do nicely.)

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This is not an exhaustive list, just what I could think of off the top of my head.