To incensed at the length of time organisations keep us waiting before answering the phone or replying on line

[Tremblingmadness]

Having spent four hours waiting to speak to HMRC today I am tearing my hair out.

I have an urgent payment query caused by an issue in their system. I attempted to resolve it with their AI offering, but the bot couldn’t understand.

There have followed three phone calls, all cut off at about the 1 hour stage. I am currently on the fourth.

Why, why, why? Just why?

My issue won’t go away, it has to be answered, so why do they believe it will help the situation by making me waste a large part of the day listening to them telling me how important my call is, while playing me the most irritating jingle.

Last week it was my Insurance Company, two weeks ago the AA.

I just don’t get what the point is. These organisations have to respond eventually, their AI is not fit for purpose, so why not resource sufficiently to do so in a timely manner.

AIBU to want someone to answer the phone within a few rings and what is the point of keeping us all sitting in a queue and having to ring back numerous times to get a resolution.

You want to try the CMS. 1 hour, to get through to someone who can't help,then transferred to someone else and on hold for another hour. And they're only open8-5 mon-fri so you can't even ring them on your lunch hour.

It just doesn’t make sense.

The demand won’t go away so why frustrate callers before they even get through !!

Well the ai does help, it just didn't help you today.

Why were the calls cut off? Perhaps it's your network provider. Stay calm and be patient, they're not out to get you.

It’s the loads of queries where they don’t need to speak with someone: I.e. answer on the website, could be resolved by AI etc., that causes the demand and delay for your type of query. That and people who aren’t able to articulate a problem succinctly, so a five minute call takes 30 mins.
we need better journeys for standard transactions so that support can focus on the complex issues.

Because it saves them.paying out for salaries for people who answer calls. They don't care about how long you wait

I don’t really want to pay more tax for civil servant call centres, when realistically better communication and signposting would reduce demand.

I think you have an idea that they're all sitting round listening to the phone ring and deciding to just not answer. That's just not the case.

Yes this.
It annoys me when they say they’re “experiencing a high volume of calls” when they mean “we haven’t adequately staffed our call centre.”

I believe Fujitsu are responsible for some of HMRC systems !

I know what you mean OP, all the admin we are now expected to do. Even organising returns I find frustrating.

5 hours with talk talk on online chat, pulling my hair out with them.

I hate hate hate when their voice message says "Did you know, you can deal with almost all your queries in your online account" or similar.

Like, yes I did know! And I do use it...but apparently this is the one issue I need to call you for so could you stop the patronising "try our website"! Honestly, I wouldn't mind if the first phone option was "have you tried to resolve this on our website" - Yes, it explicitly says I need to call you - okay we'll get to you asap! No - fine, but we'll answer your call after all the people who can't do their query online!

That and the music suddenly cutting, so you go to answer it, only for a cheery "Sorry to keep you waiting....your call is important so, please continue to hold....did you know our website can help with account queries..."

This constantly annoys me. I often feel annoyed by the the time I get to speak to someone. It can’t be very pleasant for the call handlers dealing with frustrated and angry customers.

I voted YABU by mistake.

British Gas! They owe me a refund….I've spent hours listening to ‘The Hunter is down’ Why, why is it so difficult to sort something out with just one phone call?

On the plus side, if you call Sky you can choose your own hold music! I found that quite exciting

Eventually got through on the fourth call.

They agreed their system cuts you off at the one hour point, because ‘most people wont wait that long’

And confirmed that even they didn’t know the answer to my question. They had to go away and seek advice from a manager. They then phoned me back an hour later to say that they had made a mistake with the allocation of my payment and wouldn’t be charging me interest / penalties at the end of the month.

I am always exceedingly polite because I know it isn’t the fault of the call centre staff that they are under resourced, but inside I am exceedingly frustrated.

The AI currently has absolutely no chance of unravelling issues / mistakes of this nature and until it does HMRC need to resource the phone lines so they can be resolved without wasting four hours of my day.

Hmm, currently I’m dealing with a probate process. I can confirm ai and bots are not a great thing for dealing with anything properly. Additionally, all caller services with wait queueing are liable to cut people off from time to time and it’s mostly their tech fail not the person calling.

Yanbu. I spent an hour getting through to CMS yesterday. They never have enough staff answering their calls and I honestly believe they hope you’ll just give up and create less work for them.

Yanbu, the HMRC hour cut off is hellish, you have no choice but to start again, and again because of fines etc if you don't.

I had similar today with my insurance providers online bot bollocks, I'd like to think if I go with someone else they'd be better but I think this is now just the new normal.

Along with trying to remember my passwords 🤣

This happens because people who work in call centres are paid peanuts, so it's difficult to recruit and retain staff. It's also a difficult and demanding job, dealing with often angry and unreasonable callers. The problem will only be solved when companies realise they need to pay more to retain quality staff.

While I agree overall. Was it a personal tax query? Because January is absolutely insane time to call HMRC. But a tip for next time, call at 8am exactly and you'll get straight through.

Amazon live chat with a real person can be frustrating. If they can’t deal with the the query they swap you to the next person. I was on for 2 hours once with a work related purchase problem. The book we purchased didn’t arrive. The same day we received a gift voucher for porn. When I chased up the book they insisted tge parcel had been signed for. We linked the 2 things but the live chat people didn’t know what to do apart from apologise. I had to keep saying ‘thanks for the apology but now send a refund’ Eventually, we reached person 6 who actually knew what to do.

It needs more money to employ people and for people to genuinely search for an answer before picking up the phone then the more complex queries could be dealt with efficiently. I can promise you for all the complex queries that genuinely need a person on the end of the phone, there are 50 which could have been dealt with if the person had just searched the website.

problem is no one wants to pay more tax to resource public sector contact centres and the public do not want to pay higher cost (booking fees, higher product costs etc) to better resource private companies to resource their contact centres. We run a small business with a contact center as part of it so I am well attuned to the issues. We have a very very easy website with heaps of information, well sign posted to information but still people call up for the most basic of queries, badly articulated which then take forever to resolve. A lot of them just want to chat. We’d go bust if we resourced it to answer everyones call within 10-15 mins.

But there is a case in point. Go into a bookshop and they can order literally anything with an isbn for you. If it goes wrong you will get great after sales service (generally!). But no one wants to do this - they want cheap, quick and easy from Amazon so you get what you pay for.

I’m an acquisitions librarian for a top academic library I specialise in patron led acquisition. I’m doing what the person in the book shop might do for you if that bookshop happened to offer that service. The obvious difference is that our patrons request a title and - unless it falls outside the scope of our collections or is wildly off what their research area is - we attempt to buy it and there is no charge to the patron.

As for ISBNs - you most definitely cannot order ‘literally anything” with one and there’s plenty of stuff doesn’t have an isbn. Not just older/out of print stuff. Some countries have used same isbn s for different titles.

The book in question was never obtained either from the source I mentioned or from the other - more expensive - option I tried after we got the refund agreed.

One of only 2 failures in 2022 purchasing ledger.

And then IF you manage to speak to someone it will be someone you can’t understand. It’s awful.