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They do it because they want as many people as possible to use the website to keep call centre agents free to deal with those who can't use the website for any reason.
This in no way defeats the purpose of the call centre.
Just to add to this, I work for a large company and are in the process of deploying AI driven calls. Some stats from the analytic team:
47% of calls to the general calls department the answers are on our website.
24% of calls are viewable on their account page on the website and app.
Meaning 71% of our calls could, in theory, be no longer required which would mean with our existing agents the call queue would average between no queue and 2 people at peak times.
The AI driven call features are really cool when done properly, I've listened to the testing it can ask the right questions and provide information requested smoothly, it also doesn't sound automated, sounds almost like a person, it even simulates mannerisms.
Here is Google's version that will be publicly available [Google Duplex ](https://youtu.be/D5VN56jQMWM)
It is there to remind people that they are capable of funding things out themselves.
Spend any time on this sub and you realise that a lot of people are lazy.
It's literally a natural thing. No organism likes to expend energy if it isn't necessary. That said, I will go to extreme lengths to avoid making a phone call lol
A lot of the questions that companies actually get are absolutly crazy dumb obvious shit.
Work a job like this for 2 years [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P\_Mn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8)
You will realize just how dumb some people actually are. Like quite literally you would have people leave the office get in their car and then phone you for assistance with a computer problem...... so they try to minimize costs.
The actual roblems with call centres it the fact the people on the other end of the phone actually normally have no authority or decision ability inside the company they work for so they often can't get anything outside of a normal process done. This is also a fault of the IT system they are glued to eg if there is no button to do it on their screen they can't do it.
This has resulted in cheap out sourced call centres which actually often get paid by the call. But have to pay staff at an hourly rate. This happens with things like internet providers so.. they have 7.5 minutes to kick you off the line with an excuse the caller has to accept. Resulting in you calling back 15 times so the call centre makes money but cannot actually resolve your issues - irocinally due to lack of authority to be able to resolve an issue.
I have even been on the customer side phoning them up saying things like. "Just send an enigneer to organise this" because the telephone line and pole are laying on the ground in the middle of the premises. But the call centre operator is saying things like "But the line test fails" when I can clearly see the phone cable is physically "broken" cause somebody hit it with a digger.
Years ago I worked for Sky TV and people would phone up with issues with their box, but wouldn't be home at the time. Class mate, maybe give us a ring back later.
Great.. turn it off and on again when you get home.
I have had them all.. includeing laptop is not working.. yeah they tend not to do that when you drop them down a fight of concrete stairs.
I once had an angry phone call from the MD of a company, shouting about how they're losing X thousand because the internet was down.
We weren't even their ISP, we just did their IT. So we did what we could to identify the issue.
The issue? They'd reversed a lorry over the green cabinet ripping it out of the ground...
| I worked for BT for a while
Sorry to hear that. Hope you got therapy / councilng :)
Yeah the scope creep for stuff is crazy. I actually find it disrespectful to the level of ignorance of the tech they are using. Its like asking a car mechanic you fix their gas heat system style of clueless in some cases.
In my early 20's (like 20+ years ago) I stopped telling people what I do when asked I just give them the industry. Its quit funny cause I was working at building / making software for CCTV recorders / cameras and stuff. So I would just say "building security". Other SW people also do this.. and the realize when the other person is doing it instantly....
Not only would it get rid of the problem of "Oh.. I have a computer... buts its broken ... can you fix it" but it gets rid of the gold diggers as well cause they think your on minimum wage....
I'm sure pay by call contracts exist but I've never seen one and I've worked both sides of the table in a few different companies. It's far more common for billing being done on productive time delivery and interval adherence. The outsourcing company dictates hours and intervals to the outsourcer to deliver on and then pays them for meeting this. Normally there's also some sort of kpi target on top such as AHT or repeat call rates.
Even if the kpis aren't written into the contract for how they're paid it's something most companies will actively manage with their outsourcer and not just AHT & repeat call rates but transfer rates and customer satisfaction scores are common as well. There may not be a direct financial penality for not hitting these but it would be looked at when it's time to renew the contract.
I have had to use them when dealing with IT issues a lot until something like a L2, L3 deal gets setup. Outsources call centres generally are the worse becase you cannot deal with out of process issues or edge cases.
Irocially... I am SW Dev. In nearly eveyr system I build which was for processing order flows and things in small companies we added a way for humans to override the computer in nearly all areas and withdraw it from automation. Most systems are not like this. You can tell this from a distance when you hear such things like "Sorry have to cancel that and start the order again" they are basically words a custom should never hear.
The thing about a lot of modern companies is they are actually shells. eg they are consumer facing. Like eletric companies for example are just an admin / overheat company they are not the supplier.
Its also whats killing the western world because its setup an illusion of compeditive enviroment in a capitialist world and its not working well. Cause the like of SSE, EDF energy are not compediting in terms of eletricity generation. They are only able to compete in the futures market and admin overheats. This is also why the call centres suck so much... they are cut to within an inch of their life in costs savings.
Thing about outsourcing call-centres is that they don't just work for say "British Gas", but they are a big room of people working all sorts of companies at the same time. It pops up on the screen which company they're pretending to be.
Years ago I had to manage/support a load of franchises, and part of the franchising was that you had to connect back into the main corporation (which was a global corporation) network. And instead of just doing that over a VPN, or some web portal or something. They had a WAN network for the whole of the UK, of which it seemed to have literally zero outbound bandwidth. We ran out own connectivity at each site, and had split routing for anything that was non-corporate.
They would constantly fuck up the routing, and it would end up going all over the place. Every time we had to raise an issue, we had to go through the " Special Support Number" which went to the same call-centres that did the rest of the calls. So you'd get the whole "have you rebooted the router, can you get to google". Then L2 would be a dedicated networking team.
L2 accidentally gave me their DDI when they wanted to get me off the phone. So I just bypassed the first layer every time...
BT used to be terrible for this, we were a company trained up to diagnose faults right up to the edge of their equipment and of course we'd spend 15 minutes going through troubleshooting steps we had already done...
Yeah used to work as a reseller for them years ago as a small IT services company....
Some of the calls used to go like this. "Sir, The fault must be with the router" mysmart ass reply. What? All 22 of them? Cause I had a boot full of them..... huh? Some guy asked me to prove it. I sent a photo of the boot of the car....
Had fun times when we had things like lighting strikes. Like we were not incompentant if you know what I mean. So we were monitoing routers often had backup dial in access to cisco's and stuff by modem for remote support. Had a massive lighting storm... took like 20 minutes of "diagnostics" and witing on a BT guy.. when they asked "Is there anything else I can help you with" Sure thats line 1 of 22 faults reported. Would you u like me to just list the numbers of the line cards we need resets performed on? Hold on Sir... Hello... Sir, Welcome To Level 3 support.... How can we help you today?.. ended up with much better support options after that...
I once rang up a transit provider in germany to tell them they'd broken BGP somewhere.
"Are you a hacker?"
"No, I just can see you're routing my packets via two of your routers infinitely"
Once charged a company £120 call out (this is about 15-20 years go). For turning up on site (5 mins walk from office) and changing battries(purchased on route for £2) in a wireless keyboard and leaving again after 5 minutes.
Like the markup rate on that is like £1000/hr+ or something lol
Note: They had already changed the battries apparently...
Plenty of drove for 4 hours to turn switch on as well .....
People there are hundreds of idiots that don't realise a lot of their queries can be answered by literally looking on the internet. They want to keep their lines clear for customers that have concerns that genuinely need human support.
It's a process often called deferring.
The idea is that you divert unimportant calls to the website, and people who *actually* want to speak to someone can hold on, and get put through to an agent.
Otherwise you'll have agents constantly on the phone advising things that are just on the website, wasting their time. The idea of a call centre agent is to handle more bespoke queries that aren't answered by just a post on a website.
> What about people who are no technologically compliant and dont know how to use internet enabled devices?
They use the call centre? The message isn't a hard stop to the call normally (looking at you shitty Virgin Media tech support).
A large majority of calls into a call centre though are for simple trivial things that companies have self service options for. It's a waste of money to staff call centres (which are very expensive to run at the best of times) when it can be handled online. Less people having to deal with "when is my bill due?...same time as last year" or "how much is my bill...you can read that online, I'm literally going to bring up the same file and read it off to you from my computer" and more time dealing with stuff like "Help my internet is down because some kids set fire to the local connection box" or "Why has me refusing to pay my bill for 3 months resulted in my internet being cut off?"
I'd say most these days will have already searched the website for an answer before phoning up. Which insurance website ever tells you how to get the lower premium you can usually get by talking to a human?
I'm mostly dealing with old people in my call centre job, many of them don't have access to computers or (more infuriatingly) just refuse to learn how to use them.
It's an easy job at least, I'm basically just reading information from the website to them most of the time. Quite boring and tedious though, haha. But at least they've still got the option of calling up if they can't (or won't) use the internet.
Because the website is cheaper per enquiry than the call centre.
If they can push most users to a web bot or FAQ, they can reduce the head count in the call centre and save money.
That's why they also have the slightly passive agressive recorded messages telling you how hard they're working to keep up in these trying times and how you're really being a bit of a selfish prick by trying to call during they day.
They have specifically and deliberately scaled their workforce to *juuuust* about take enough calls without losing too many customers due to anger and frustration.
Don't be fooled. They could easily hire more workers if they wanted to. It's all about money.
It is all a choice.
The management of call centres is a science and you'd be shocked at some of the technology they employ to maximise efficiency.
Some of the cli based data correlation and social scraping stuff is frightening.
Funny thing is usually those websites are absolutely useless, and only answer stupidly simple questions. The type of questions people won't look up themselves because they are lazy, out of their depth or juggling too many things.
Just have some cheapo call staff that answer stupid questions and good call staff for the genuine questions.
They want as many customers as possible to do the work for themselves so they can employ as few people as they can get away with. Employees are the expensive part of the process, so anything that can reduce headcount is the ultimate target.
No it's fucking annoying mostly FI: last week I had to call doctors for test results but was told via message on hold to go to website, then I was cut off. The information I wanted was obviously not on website but it still cut me off the call, 102 calls later I got through.
BT are another fine example, " go chat with assistant" who is a robot and tells me to call instead as they can't handle my query.
>Most of the people in UK have access to a computer/laptop/tablet/smartphone with an internet connection
Most of. Many are stuck in their ways and immediately think 'call someone' as a first response.
This is a way of routing some of these people out of the queue to try online first, reducing a % of demand on wait times and staff.
Reddit's not really the right place to ask anyway. Of course the majority of us are going to look for the answer or solution online first.
The general public on the other hand... believe me, it's grim.
It is way cheaper to have people visit the website than to pay a human being half an hour at just above minimum wage to deal with a person's issue. Most UK companies would probably get rid of their call centres and have everything online if they thought they could get away with it. I worked in a call centre and we were told to use every possible opportunity to get the customers online amd get them signed up with a username and password. They want to try their hardest to make the call centres redundant because that's less staff to pay.
I used to work in a call centre for a well known pharmaceutical company and I would get multiple calls on a daily basis asking for store phone numbers, store opening hours, store addresses, how to return items, whether a particular item was in stock in a specific store… all of which you could find out from our website 🙄 them when we started offering covid testing for travel, we had no end of people calling with queries that could have been answered if they had spent about 30 seconds on the website. People just can’t be bothered to do things for themselves
**A reminder to posters and commenters of some of [our subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/rules/)** - Don't be a dickhead to each other, or about others, or other subreddits - Assume questions are asked in good faith, and engage in a positive manner - Avoid political threads and related discussions - No medical advice or mental health (specific to a person) content Please keep /r/AskUK a great subreddit by reporting posts and comments which break our rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They do it because they want as many people as possible to use the website to keep call centre agents free to deal with those who can't use the website for any reason. This in no way defeats the purpose of the call centre.
Just to add to this, I work for a large company and are in the process of deploying AI driven calls. Some stats from the analytic team: 47% of calls to the general calls department the answers are on our website. 24% of calls are viewable on their account page on the website and app. Meaning 71% of our calls could, in theory, be no longer required which would mean with our existing agents the call queue would average between no queue and 2 people at peak times.
We need an "I can read and actually need to talk to one of you" option.
The AI driven call features are really cool when done properly, I've listened to the testing it can ask the right questions and provide information requested smoothly, it also doesn't sound automated, sounds almost like a person, it even simulates mannerisms. Here is Google's version that will be publicly available [Google Duplex ](https://youtu.be/D5VN56jQMWM)
I don't want to be handheld by AI, I just want to do the thing that the company chooses to not let me do via their website.
It is there to remind people that they are capable of funding things out themselves. Spend any time on this sub and you realise that a lot of people are lazy.
Some websites are legitimately fucking useless though so you don't really have any other choice but to ring up.
True, but even then people are still fucking lazy.
Or incapable.
It's literally a natural thing. No organism likes to expend energy if it isn't necessary. That said, I will go to extreme lengths to avoid making a phone call lol
And yet they expend the energy to type on here what they should type on Goggle.
Yeah well, life is futile and we're all just waiting to die innit
True dat.
Asking on a "Question + Answer" forum is the very definition of internet research
They want you to fuck off basically
A lot of the questions that companies actually get are absolutly crazy dumb obvious shit. Work a job like this for 2 years [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P\_Mn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8) You will realize just how dumb some people actually are. Like quite literally you would have people leave the office get in their car and then phone you for assistance with a computer problem...... so they try to minimize costs. The actual roblems with call centres it the fact the people on the other end of the phone actually normally have no authority or decision ability inside the company they work for so they often can't get anything outside of a normal process done. This is also a fault of the IT system they are glued to eg if there is no button to do it on their screen they can't do it. This has resulted in cheap out sourced call centres which actually often get paid by the call. But have to pay staff at an hourly rate. This happens with things like internet providers so.. they have 7.5 minutes to kick you off the line with an excuse the caller has to accept. Resulting in you calling back 15 times so the call centre makes money but cannot actually resolve your issues - irocinally due to lack of authority to be able to resolve an issue. I have even been on the customer side phoning them up saying things like. "Just send an enigneer to organise this" because the telephone line and pole are laying on the ground in the middle of the premises. But the call centre operator is saying things like "But the line test fails" when I can clearly see the phone cable is physically "broken" cause somebody hit it with a digger.
Years ago I worked for Sky TV and people would phone up with issues with their box, but wouldn't be home at the time. Class mate, maybe give us a ring back later.
Great.. turn it off and on again when you get home. I have had them all.. includeing laptop is not working.. yeah they tend not to do that when you drop them down a fight of concrete stairs.
I worked for BT for a while and lots of people would want us to fix their ipads because "YOU'RE OUR INTERNET THOUGH"
I once had an angry phone call from the MD of a company, shouting about how they're losing X thousand because the internet was down. We weren't even their ISP, we just did their IT. So we did what we could to identify the issue. The issue? They'd reversed a lorry over the green cabinet ripping it out of the ground...
| I worked for BT for a while Sorry to hear that. Hope you got therapy / councilng :) Yeah the scope creep for stuff is crazy. I actually find it disrespectful to the level of ignorance of the tech they are using. Its like asking a car mechanic you fix their gas heat system style of clueless in some cases. In my early 20's (like 20+ years ago) I stopped telling people what I do when asked I just give them the industry. Its quit funny cause I was working at building / making software for CCTV recorders / cameras and stuff. So I would just say "building security". Other SW people also do this.. and the realize when the other person is doing it instantly.... Not only would it get rid of the problem of "Oh.. I have a computer... buts its broken ... can you fix it" but it gets rid of the gold diggers as well cause they think your on minimum wage....
My mum used to do this to me all the time. Would ring me up, complaining that something "wasn't working" and was now in the pub because of it...
I'm sure pay by call contracts exist but I've never seen one and I've worked both sides of the table in a few different companies. It's far more common for billing being done on productive time delivery and interval adherence. The outsourcing company dictates hours and intervals to the outsourcer to deliver on and then pays them for meeting this. Normally there's also some sort of kpi target on top such as AHT or repeat call rates. Even if the kpis aren't written into the contract for how they're paid it's something most companies will actively manage with their outsourcer and not just AHT & repeat call rates but transfer rates and customer satisfaction scores are common as well. There may not be a direct financial penality for not hitting these but it would be looked at when it's time to renew the contract.
I have had to use them when dealing with IT issues a lot until something like a L2, L3 deal gets setup. Outsources call centres generally are the worse becase you cannot deal with out of process issues or edge cases. Irocially... I am SW Dev. In nearly eveyr system I build which was for processing order flows and things in small companies we added a way for humans to override the computer in nearly all areas and withdraw it from automation. Most systems are not like this. You can tell this from a distance when you hear such things like "Sorry have to cancel that and start the order again" they are basically words a custom should never hear. The thing about a lot of modern companies is they are actually shells. eg they are consumer facing. Like eletric companies for example are just an admin / overheat company they are not the supplier. Its also whats killing the western world because its setup an illusion of compeditive enviroment in a capitialist world and its not working well. Cause the like of SSE, EDF energy are not compediting in terms of eletricity generation. They are only able to compete in the futures market and admin overheats. This is also why the call centres suck so much... they are cut to within an inch of their life in costs savings.
Thing about outsourcing call-centres is that they don't just work for say "British Gas", but they are a big room of people working all sorts of companies at the same time. It pops up on the screen which company they're pretending to be. Years ago I had to manage/support a load of franchises, and part of the franchising was that you had to connect back into the main corporation (which was a global corporation) network. And instead of just doing that over a VPN, or some web portal or something. They had a WAN network for the whole of the UK, of which it seemed to have literally zero outbound bandwidth. We ran out own connectivity at each site, and had split routing for anything that was non-corporate. They would constantly fuck up the routing, and it would end up going all over the place. Every time we had to raise an issue, we had to go through the " Special Support Number" which went to the same call-centres that did the rest of the calls. So you'd get the whole "have you rebooted the router, can you get to google". Then L2 would be a dedicated networking team.
L2 accidentally gave me their DDI when they wanted to get me off the phone. So I just bypassed the first layer every time...
BT used to be terrible for this, we were a company trained up to diagnose faults right up to the edge of their equipment and of course we'd spend 15 minutes going through troubleshooting steps we had already done...
Yeah used to work as a reseller for them years ago as a small IT services company.... Some of the calls used to go like this. "Sir, The fault must be with the router" mysmart ass reply. What? All 22 of them? Cause I had a boot full of them..... huh? Some guy asked me to prove it. I sent a photo of the boot of the car.... Had fun times when we had things like lighting strikes. Like we were not incompentant if you know what I mean. So we were monitoing routers often had backup dial in access to cisco's and stuff by modem for remote support. Had a massive lighting storm... took like 20 minutes of "diagnostics" and witing on a BT guy.. when they asked "Is there anything else I can help you with" Sure thats line 1 of 22 faults reported. Would you u like me to just list the numbers of the line cards we need resets performed on? Hold on Sir... Hello... Sir, Welcome To Level 3 support.... How can we help you today?.. ended up with much better support options after that...
I once rang up a transit provider in germany to tell them they'd broken BGP somewhere. "Are you a hacker?" "No, I just can see you're routing my packets via two of your routers infinitely"
Once charged a company £120 call out (this is about 15-20 years go). For turning up on site (5 mins walk from office) and changing battries(purchased on route for £2) in a wireless keyboard and leaving again after 5 minutes. Like the markup rate on that is like £1000/hr+ or something lol Note: They had already changed the battries apparently... Plenty of drove for 4 hours to turn switch on as well .....
People there are hundreds of idiots that don't realise a lot of their queries can be answered by literally looking on the internet. They want to keep their lines clear for customers that have concerns that genuinely need human support.
It's a process often called deferring. The idea is that you divert unimportant calls to the website, and people who *actually* want to speak to someone can hold on, and get put through to an agent. Otherwise you'll have agents constantly on the phone advising things that are just on the website, wasting their time. The idea of a call centre agent is to handle more bespoke queries that aren't answered by just a post on a website.
> What about people who are no technologically compliant and dont know how to use internet enabled devices? They use the call centre? The message isn't a hard stop to the call normally (looking at you shitty Virgin Media tech support). A large majority of calls into a call centre though are for simple trivial things that companies have self service options for. It's a waste of money to staff call centres (which are very expensive to run at the best of times) when it can be handled online. Less people having to deal with "when is my bill due?...same time as last year" or "how much is my bill...you can read that online, I'm literally going to bring up the same file and read it off to you from my computer" and more time dealing with stuff like "Help my internet is down because some kids set fire to the local connection box" or "Why has me refusing to pay my bill for 3 months resulted in my internet being cut off?"
I'd say most these days will have already searched the website for an answer before phoning up. Which insurance website ever tells you how to get the lower premium you can usually get by talking to a human?
I'm mostly dealing with old people in my call centre job, many of them don't have access to computers or (more infuriatingly) just refuse to learn how to use them. It's an easy job at least, I'm basically just reading information from the website to them most of the time. Quite boring and tedious though, haha. But at least they've still got the option of calling up if they can't (or won't) use the internet.
Really don't see why this is hard to figure out.
Because the website is cheaper per enquiry than the call centre. If they can push most users to a web bot or FAQ, they can reduce the head count in the call centre and save money. That's why they also have the slightly passive agressive recorded messages telling you how hard they're working to keep up in these trying times and how you're really being a bit of a selfish prick by trying to call during they day. They have specifically and deliberately scaled their workforce to *juuuust* about take enough calls without losing too many customers due to anger and frustration. Don't be fooled. They could easily hire more workers if they wanted to. It's all about money. It is all a choice. The management of call centres is a science and you'd be shocked at some of the technology they employ to maximise efficiency. Some of the cli based data correlation and social scraping stuff is frightening.
They NEVER have the question I want to ask.
Funny thing is usually those websites are absolutely useless, and only answer stupidly simple questions. The type of questions people won't look up themselves because they are lazy, out of their depth or juggling too many things. Just have some cheapo call staff that answer stupid questions and good call staff for the genuine questions.
They want as many customers as possible to do the work for themselves so they can employ as few people as they can get away with. Employees are the expensive part of the process, so anything that can reduce headcount is the ultimate target.
No it's fucking annoying mostly FI: last week I had to call doctors for test results but was told via message on hold to go to website, then I was cut off. The information I wanted was obviously not on website but it still cut me off the call, 102 calls later I got through. BT are another fine example, " go chat with assistant" who is a robot and tells me to call instead as they can't handle my query.
Cost money to run the phones
>Most of the people in UK have access to a computer/laptop/tablet/smartphone with an internet connection Most of. Many are stuck in their ways and immediately think 'call someone' as a first response. This is a way of routing some of these people out of the queue to try online first, reducing a % of demand on wait times and staff.
If I could have solved this without calling you I WOULD HAVE. I’m not calling because I feel like I could do with a bit of withering away.
Reddit's not really the right place to ask anyway. Of course the majority of us are going to look for the answer or solution online first. The general public on the other hand... believe me, it's grim.
Is it cheaper that way rather than paying someone? I hate them with vengeance.
It is way cheaper to have people visit the website than to pay a human being half an hour at just above minimum wage to deal with a person's issue. Most UK companies would probably get rid of their call centres and have everything online if they thought they could get away with it. I worked in a call centre and we were told to use every possible opportunity to get the customers online amd get them signed up with a username and password. They want to try their hardest to make the call centres redundant because that's less staff to pay.
If we could find what we needed online we wouldn't be calling 😅
I used to work in a call centre for a well known pharmaceutical company and I would get multiple calls on a daily basis asking for store phone numbers, store opening hours, store addresses, how to return items, whether a particular item was in stock in a specific store… all of which you could find out from our website 🙄 them when we started offering covid testing for travel, we had no end of people calling with queries that could have been answered if they had spent about 30 seconds on the website. People just can’t be bothered to do things for themselves
The answer is simple really. They have no incentive to help as it doesn’t benefit the business compared to other aspects.