When call management services don't make callers happy

I had to make a doctors appointment yesterday. I looked online to get their contact number and saw that their phone lines opened at 8am. It was 7:59am so I thought I’d be cheeky and decided to call them, just in case their time plan was a minute early or my watch was slightly out.

I was greeted with an out of hours message informing me of the opening times. Which is always good. Luckily I didn’t have to wait long before I could try again. But at 8am it all went down hill…

‘User busy’

The second my phone said 8am, I dialled the number. And do you know what I was met with? The user busy tone. No greeting or anything. Just the user busy tone. So I tried again. And again. And again. At the risk of sounding a little obsessive, I tried a whopping 60 times in total (just by clicking the ‘User Busy’ key on my phone every time it came up; so I’m not that obsessive...honest). The problem is, I didn’t want to give up. Booking a doctors appointment can quite often be a pain in the backside.

After 8 minutes(!) of trying to get through, I finally got the in-hour greeting message. And then I was put on hold. Great. After 2 minutes on hold I got through to someone. Even though I was now connected, my pessimistic side broke through and I was convinced that the call would drop for some reason and I’d have to go through it all over again. If that had happened I would have turned green and "Hulk smash!"

Luckily it didn’t.

How could it have been improved?

Being able to handle more calls at once would be useful, rather than the caller getting a constant ‘User Busy’ tone. This would probably fix some other issues too. Like why didn’t I get the Call Greeting the first 60 times? And once I’d finally got past the user busy tone, I was put on hold - but again, why didn’t that happen the first time I called?

When I first called I should have got the in-hours call greeting and then be placed on hold if they were too busy to answer the call straight away. I would have been happy to stay on hold while they dealt with other calls before mine, had they done that in the first place.

I don't know what sort of system they've got, but it seems they have all the services in place, but just set up wrong. It made me appreciate what we've been able to create in myTTNC. Not only can we provide Call Greeting and Call Queuing systems, but our customers have complete control of this through our online control panel. It's smashing (not in the Hulk way this time)!

If you're looking for ways to improve how you're handling calls and keeping your callers happy, let us know. We'd be more than happy to talk through what you could be doing, and how simple it can be.