[mitthrowaway2]

Often, holding times are not only due to a shortage of call center employees available, but also to encourage the caller to give up. I doubt the hold time would be zero, unless the government legislates a maximum hold time. Even then, the AI could stall with endless patience and requesting clarifications and further information, and repeating details back to you to confirm, with minor errors requiring correction, which might be even worse than waiting on hold.

[extr]

Do you have direct experience with a call center where this was happening? This sounds like a ridiculous conspiracy theory. In every call center I've ever had experience in, median/mean hold time was a KPI that was relentlessly optimized for. Hourly demand was modeled and staffing levels were set such that hold times were kept to the minimum possible with the resources available. Calls-not-answered was an inverse metric. That's not to say the optimal hold time is always zero. It's also bad to have too many staff sitting idle "just in case" demand suddenly peaks. It's a tricky problem. But LLMs obviously obey the laws of compute scaling, not human scaling, so I would expect it to scale to demand very quickly.

[comfypotato]

Hold times are optimized for customer retention and profits. This implies that you’re both correct. It’s just the perspective: if people give up on their query but stay a customer that’s fine. Most call centers don’t exactly have the degree of customer service of a hospitality institution like a luxury hotel.

I’ve always appreciated the perspective that they just figure out how much staff they need to stop the customers from getting too pissed off.

[m3kw9]

New security threat unlocked: DDOS for chat agents