I've long said that if your company is "experiencing a higher volume of calls that normal" for more than a day or two, then that's your new normal.

This feels like planned obsolescence but for customer service. Ugh.

I worked at a company for many years that tried to improve call center customer service. It was an uphill battle.

Companies categorize departments as revenue-generating or necessary expenses. Even if they don't formally make that categorization, that's how they think about things. If you're revenue-generating, expenses are easy to justify. If not, the whole game is to minimize costs.

Customer service in general, and call centers especially, often falls into the "necessary expense" category. Companies don't want to think about it, except about how to reduce its cost. It's out there with janitorial services. You can tell them all day that it's costing them customers, but chances are it's falling on deaf ears because the C-level executives aren't listening.

What's worse, some companies (think Comcast) have special VIP customer service for executives, politicians, influencers, and other squeaky wheels. Which even more insulate them from reality.

The exception is luxury brands which have the attitude that every paying customer is a VIP. Apple's whole brand is: sure you could get an Android, but then you don't get the Genius Bar.

I remember Mike Birbiglia telling a story about customer service hanging up on you on Letterman years and years ago. Thankfully YouTube remembered it too- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0w3fxmB9_Y

The longer you make people wait for support—and the more times they have to call you to get it—the more frustrated they get with you and your product/service. You do not want to be the support rep who's unlucky enough to answer a call from someone on whom your system hung up, because by that time, that customer is 10x more frustrated than they were about whatever prompted them to call you in the first place.

I don't get the logic. Yes, I understand that megacorps don't want to/can't afford to talk to each one of us having problems with their service. And they have successfully built impenetrable moats that prevent anything but the very lowest level of support. But this seems foolishly short-sighted unless you're a monopoly.

The service from my ISP has been getting worse over the years. Faster speeds, but greatly decreased reliability. Leading up to this July 4 weekend, they had 50% uptime on Thursday, until it failed completely on the 4th. Each outage produced the usual automated text about an expected repair time. The last message, sent Friday night, said to expect service to return Monday night -- they are telling me to count on a 3-day outage. I tried calling tech support, and then tried other paths through the call menus. Lots of waiting.

It was on the second dropped call that I gave up on them. I've switched ISPs. They've lost a customer forever. They did this by successfully guarding themselves from hearing complaints.