venta: (Default)
Is it impolite to correct the grammar of someone in a callcentre ? (I didn't, but I wanted to since his mis-use actually completely threw me).

He asked me (after I'd explained why I was ringing) my name, my address, and the nature for my call.

The what ?

"The nature for your call."

He meant nature of, of course. I did think that, but given that I'd already explained at length what was wrong, I thought I must be misunderstanding.

After several rounds of "What?" "The nature for your call." "The nature?" "Yes" he eventually rephrased as "Why are you calling?"

I explained the whole thing again, and he did say "Oh yes", as if the long story I'd told him two minutes earlier was indeed vaguely familiar. He also scored approximately 1.25 bwmpm (number of times on average the phrase 'bear with me' is uttered per minute).

Bah. Stupid call-centre scripts which teach you only to parse information if presented in answer to a question.
venta: (Default)
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

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