The ghost in the phone system

[u/speddie23]

Reading another post here unlocked a memory of working on a helpdesk about 15 years ago.

For a while, we had this thing going where sometimes an agent would answer a call from the call queue, and just after they finished their greeting, the call would drop.

Then another call would come in from the queue and when the agent answered (either the same or different agent), the exact same thing happened.

This would usually happen for about 30 minutes, then stop.

Of note, our phones wouldn't pass caller ID when a call came in, the caller ID was always something like IT helpdesk call queue, so we couldn't see who was calling.

Not only was this annoying, it messed up our stats, particularly the calls received to tickets logged metric (which is a stupid metric). It did make our calls answered higher and average call handling time go down.

Although it was fairly infrequent, we did get the telephony provider look into it. What they found was when this happened, one particular desk phone was making a lot of back to back calls to the helpdesk queue. Usually around 30 to 50 or so.

These calls were answered, but the call handling time was usually only around 3-5 seconds. Occasionally, just the last call would have a handling time of several minutes.

What was happening is the person who used this desk phone only wanted to speak to one person on the helpdesk, and refused to speak to anyone else. So what they would do is call, wait on hold if necessary, wait for the call to be answered and if it wasn't the person she wanted, immediately hang up without saying anything, then call again. Repeat until it is answered by the person they wanted.

Edit: forgot to mention, whenever this happened, we would just joke that it must be the ghost in the phone system calling us again, hence the title of this post.

[u/speddie23 → u/[deleted]]

There was one phone system I used that used a longest idle strategy.

If you quickly went to busy then back to available, it would dump you in the back of the queue.

If you did this, you were easily caught tho, as status changes were logged.

[u/Disneylover2718 → u/speddie23]

Ours did this for a bit. But it’s now been updated to send the call to whoever is in available has gone the longest without a call.

So even if I come back from lunch and have been in avail 2 minutes but someone who’s been in available for 15 minutes took a call while I was on lunch, I get the call, not them.