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Informative "Please Hold" Tone

 Get your most common doubts cleared by the recorded voice
  (+1)
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If a person with a frequent and/or a nonserious problem calls up his service and is put on hold, he would be really annoyed to find that he had to sit his phone for two hours for a solution as mundane as "turn off your computer, wait five seconds, and turn it back on".

For cases like these, the call-centres should record the more frequent problems and their solutions in a track and play it back instead of playing that annoying music or saying (repeatedly) that our call is important to them.

Thus when Mr. On-the-verge-of-committing-suicide is on hold, he might actually get the answer to his query before he's connected to an operator.

—joker_of_the_deck, May 25 2003

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       I've been through something like this. What's more annoying than your first paragraph scenario is to burrow through a series of consecutive voice menus, deeper and deeper into the tree, only to discover when you get where you're going that where you're going isn't actually there, because that the particular problem your having isn't covered in the pre-recorded list of solutions, and you have to go back into the hold queue.
—waugsqueke, May 25 2003
   

       This was baked by at least one company I called for tech support years ago. They had a tape loop of tips/common problems/etc that ran while on hold. I thought it was a great idea.   

       I don't call support lines that much, so I'm not sure if this is widely done or it was just this one company. (The long-defunct Microrim, makers of the Rbase database).
—krelnik, May 25 2003
   

       When I called up my ISP on Friday, they had a little thing about how to release/renew my lease. There might have been more, but I skipped past it to "talk to a live representative."   

       Likely, this has been baked. I like the idea regardless.   

       +
—rapid transit, May 25 2003
   

       ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
—bristolz, May 25 2003
   

       BUT HOW DO U GET 2 TEH IPCNOFIG?///   

       (much better example)
—rapid transit, May 25 2003
   

       start > run > "cmd"
—bristolz, May 25 2003
   

       My company, and many others, at least include a reference to their web site, where people's can get answers to common problems, make online service requests, etc. But making the on-hold music actually informative is a really good idea. Less good is when you have to wait through a bunch of common problems before you are even put on hold.
—beland, May 26 2003
   


 

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