May I place your call on hold!

Iam sure that at least once in your lifetime, you must have come across an annoying call centre agent who put your call on hold and literally dosed off after doing that, compelling you to cut the call out of frustration, completely draining you out of your patience and good humour. I encountered one recently.

Well at first it all starts with, ‘Allow me a moment to please check all your details’ or when they transfer your call to the supervisor or the so-called ‘concerned department’ and then put you on “hold” like FOREVER.

I however, was not that lucky as I was put on hold even before I got to say hello“Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes (or just to keep our staff amused afterwards), please hold and our trained technical representative will be with you shortly”. To top it up the pre-recorded music tone went something like this- ‘Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold’. Really! Is the call so important, then why make us wait till our cellphone battery drains out or we run out of all our calling balance! Probably they put us on hold for that incredibly long time because they hope that we would hang up by then...and most people do!

But if you are as determined as I am (or in a state of total joblessness) then you don’t hang up even after eternity.

So, later a call centre agent beamed up on my phone for precisely five seconds and only to mutter something like “thanks for holding, please hold!”, he then put me on hold once again by when my brain had permanently registered the phrase ‘Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold’ as non volatile memory or ROM, for the rest of my life.

The customer service agent resurfaced again with the phrase “How may I help you today!” But by then I had forgotten the problem I wanted to query him about, instead and all I wanted to reply was, ‘help me, by not putting me on hold again!’ He then asked me my name and said, ‘In order to get your complete details may I put this call on hold’. I remember to have replied NO! Yet I was put on hold for another light year. Probably the trainers tell the call centre agents during induction training- Always put the customer on “hold”, so you can show them “who’s the boss!”

Finally, this is what the agent had to say when he resumed the conversation, “Sorry but it seems like I’m having a problem with the server here in getting your details, but thanks for waiting (and wasting your time properly while I filed my nails, chatted with my BFF and finished that whooper sandwich... burp!)”.”You may call up again after sometime or maybe tomorrow”...I swear you can still see the dent on the corner of that wall against which I did bang my head for the next eighteen hours!