A New Game...

[venta]

Ring a large company, preferrably one with an incomprehensible 'on hold' system. Ntl are good for this. Ask some question that requires them to look something up, call someone else, organise a payment...

Count how many times they say "bear with me".

Divide by the number of minutes you spent actually talking to a real person. And get a Dave-Gorman-style bear-with-me-per-minute factor.

A conversation with Ntl the other day trying to persuade them that our bill was wrong (on the grounds that the figures on the bill didn't add up to anything like the total they'd added them up to) yielded an impressive:

7 / 13 = 0.536 bwmpm

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Having finally spoken to a person at RAC, we have

2 / 4 = 0.5 bwmpm.

I'm not convinced about my formula. I think I need to do some squaring; managing, for example, 5 bwm's in a 10 minute conversation should be more impressive than 2 in 4.

Hmmmm...

Statistics ?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I think an argument based on statistical significance might be the most appropriate. Assign some nominal probability to someone saying "bear with me" in 1 minute of normal conversation, then calculate the significance level of the number of BWM you get in the sample under analysis.

That way, a consistently maintained 0.5 BWMPM over a ten minute conversation would be far more impressive than 1 BWM in a 2-minute conversation.

I tentatively recommend 0.001 BWMPM as the ambient BBWMPM (Base Bear-With-Me Per Minute) of this part of the universe.

Slight problem witn this system...

[ieyasu.livejournal.com]

...call centres are now largely internationalised. You may in fact be calling somewhere in Dehli, where operatives have been trained to speak English with a particular accent.

If trained with an American accent (as sometimes happens), they'll be much more likely to say, 'please hold while' than 'bear with me'... which could skew your statistics?

One step at a time...

[venta.livejournal.com]

It's not the idea of being put on hold while they sort something out which I'm interested in. It's the actual *repeated* use of the same phrase.

A BWM needn't be a precursor to being put on hold. It might be while they wait for their computer to load the relevant file, or merely scattered through the conversation for no readily obvious reason.

[fluffymark]

Two words. British Gas. Aaaargh!!

A few months back they sent me a Final gas bill for my the house I moved out of a year ago. It was extremely late, and it was obviously incorrect, and shoudln't have been sent out to me at all. So I tried to phone British Gas to query it. Mistake.

I got into their hold system, got told to wait, and after a couple of 'bear with me' messages, the system hung up on me. So I repeated, several times, without success that day. And then the next day, and the next day. And the next week. And so on for *2* whole months, before I finally got to speak to someone, wh omanaged a feeble apoloy and said I didn't have to pay the bill. The bwmpm factor must have been fairly impressive, had I been bothered to work it out.

The phone bill will be fairly impressive too, when I get it. The calls to the British Gas switchboard will certainly come to many times the value of the gas bill I was querying. Of course, our phoneline is billed by none other than British Gas. It's all a big conspiracy.