Category: Is It Me?

Is it me? My Speakerphone Dilemma

I think that I’m a relatively mild mannered individual, but there are certain things that get under my skin and into my head. When I work in an open plan office one of the things that puts tension straight into my shoulders is the speakerphone.

There are certain people who will, quite regularly, phone someone else on either their mobile phone, or the resident desk phone, and they will use the speaker to undertake that conversation.

Does anyone else find this annoying? Is it me?

Why? This is my dilemma, I have no rational reason for my ire. Why is someone on a speakerphone more annoying than two people having a conversation? One person talking to another person via a speaker is not significantly different, is it? Yet somehow it is, it is very different.

There are some differences:

  • People talking on a speakerphone always seem to be a little louder than two people conversing face-to-face. There’s something about a physical dialogue that causes us to calibrate our volume down to the level required. The reverse seems to be true for speakerphone conversations, we calibrate the volume upwards.
  • There’s something needless about it. I talk on calls all day utilising a headset so people are only hearing one side of the dialogue. I do this so that other people aren’t overly disturbed, so why can’t they? If you really need to use a speaker there are plenty of places in the building where that wouldn’t disturb anyone.
  • The sound from a speaker is, to me at least, harsher than a real voice. Even when the volume is turned down I can still tell when someone is on a speaker, and that harshness enhances the annoyance.

But are these enough to justify my grumpiness? That is my dilemma.

Header image: These snowdrops were getting ready for breaking out into bloom in Levens Park 

Is it me? What is “an unusually high volume of calls”?

If you’ve not heard these exact words, you’ve heard something very similar to them:

We are currently experiencing an unusually high volume of calls, please hold and a member of our team will be with you as soon as one becomes available.

You are then tortured by some music that is completely inappropriate for the narrow frequency response capabilities of a phone until there’s a short pause, just long enough for you to think “ah, a person”, and then you are again greeted with:

We are currently experiencing an unusually high volume of calls, please hold and a member of our team will be with you as soon as one becomes available.

You continue this experience until your ears are number and your brain is craving to do something more intellectually taxing – like watching daytime TV.

As is often the case, the person that you eventually get to talk to sounds plausible, and makes you believe that they have resolved your problem, so eventually you hang-up. You say to yourself, again, that there’s another hour of your life that you aren’t going to get back, but there at the back of your mind is a question, what constitutes “an unusually high volume of calls”?

You leave it a few days before you check on the progress of the thing you wanted sorted only to discover that it hasn’t and submit yourself to the inevitable second phone call to the service centre. It’s a completely different time of day, it’s a completely different day, and yet, there it is, ready to greet you like the smell of a dog that has been playing in a stagnant pond:

We are currently experiencing an unusually high volume of calls, please hold and a member of our team will be with you as soon as one becomes available.

Another hour later you still have that question, what constitutes “an unusually high volume of calls”?

What is the measure? Is this statement made on the basis of the average across a day? Or a week? Is it based on a model that factors in seasonal and regional differences? Has some significant national or global event happened that I haven’t been aware of meant that everyone needs to phone right now? Or, as I suspect it is, the definition of “unusually high” is one more than the number of service personnel that the organisation decided to roster for that time, on that day, and that the staff scheduling has little do with customer demand. The volume of service staff is almost certainly governed by the finance team with little relevance to the poor individual wanting to get a refund on their overcharged insurance bill. (Anyone guess what’s happened in my house today?)

I have wondered about setting up a web site where people can see the times and days when an organisation is normally experiencing “an unusually high volume of calls” based on crowd sourced input from people. My hope would be that people could then phone in during the non-unusual times with a high probability of speaking to an actual person, but I suspect that for some organisations there are no non-unusual times. And there is my problem, if there are no non-unusual times then sitting waiting for a service person is normal and that shows utter contempt for customers and we should all leave such organisations. Who’s with me?

(No, we won’t be using that insurance company again).