[lprubin]

My biggest problem with dealing with call centers is actually the technology. For some reason every time I talk with Amazon or Google call centers, every 10th second or so drops out from the call which is often a crucial piece of info which i'll have to ask to be repeated. It's quite frustrating that in 2022 this is still such a consistent problem.

I've always wondered what's going on from a technical side. Is it some sort of "signal delay adjustment protocol" that instead of speeding up and distorting the speech of the speaker like happens on video calls, these call center tech companies have chosen to just drop an entire second from the conversation? Or is it some other glitch?

[antsar]

Similar: A growing chunk of my support calls have the audio SO LOW that I have to turn on speakerphone and shove the thing halfway down my ear canal to decipher what they're saying. Asking the agent to speak up gets a response like I'm the first person all day to complain about this.

I guess "due to COVID", companies "just can't control" the quality of the microphone their support staff are using. Surely this has nothing to do with the side effects: it's impossible to make a usable recording of the call (to hold them accountable), I'm frustrated with the experience (and less likely to consume their support resources in the future), and maybe I'll even give up now (saving them money on a product exchange, credit, or whatever I'm calling about).

See also: long holds with noisy corpaganda instead of music, keeping you on the phone while we "fill some things in", "oops the system is loading", and so on.

Its not like these are unsolvable problems. But, money. And regulatory capture.

[slfnflctd]

I'd chalk some of it up to VOIP being inherently more complex & less stable than old analog phone systems, and the rest most likely due to the agent messing with their mute button.

When I worked in call centers, a lot of us would toggle that mute very frequently while conversing with co-workers. Sometimes to help each other out, but mostly to complain about or make fun of callers. Quite a bit of jaded cynicism in that scene.

[mhb]

Aren't they multiplexing the service people between a dozen different calls? Only half joking - a second might not be enough time to give the impression that you're being assisted.

[jimmygrapes]

Could be the monitoring that they always warn you about at the start. When a supervisor steps in or off the line it can create that sort of pause or click associated with "someone is listening in". I agree the tech should be better by now, but I don't know enough about what's going on to know exactly why.

Feels like phone latency is getting longer and longer as we move to VoIP for everything and I hate it.