A friend of mine used to work in a call center for some time. He told me an interesting and counterintuitive fact: Some call centers don’t service their callers in the classical queue order (first-come, first-served); as strange as it sounds, those call centers take callers who have been waiting for longer than 20 seconds and downgrade their priority, while callers who have been less than 20 seconds on the move up in the priority of calls.

Now why would they do that? Because it increases the overall average customer satisfaction!

Customer satisfaction decreases progressively in relation to waiting time, and 20 seconds is a critical threshold: If your call is not being answered within that time, you’re not going to be satisfied anyhow, and it doesn’t make much difference if you wait 30, 40 or 60 seconds. On the other hand, if your call is answered within a very short time (less than 20 seconds), your satisfaction is going to be quite high (if your problem gets solved of course, but that doesn’t have anything to do with your waiting time).

For this reason, catching as many callers before the 20-second threshold is much more important to have a good average customer satisfaction than treating them in the “fair order” of first-come, first-served: It’s the statistical choice between the average of 1) moderately annoyed and very annoyed people, and 2) very satisfied and very annoyed people.

This concept poses an interesting ethical dilemma, which an utilitarist might enjoy. Some consequences, off the top of my head:

  • The same principle is probably valid for e-mail responses (whereas the threshold is different)
  • Getting positive responses from very satisfied customers will be more motivating than getting average responses from moderately dissatisfied customers
  • However, you will have to deal with the accusation of favoritism or unfairness
  • Your statistical quality average might be higher, but your boss might not judge you using statistical means (especially if he or she is prone to fall for halo effects – positive or negative)
  • The next time you are stuck in a phone loop, hang up after 20 seconds and call again
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