'Sorry, all our agents are busy right now'
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why does it seem so hard to contact a business these days? It's almost like they deliberately hide their phone numbers from us. When we do manage to ring, they often make us sit through an endless list of 'caller options' before allowing us to speaking to anyone. Are they deliberately trying to dissuade us from getting in touch or are we expecting too much too soon from customer services? Evan Davis speak to the people managing our calls.
Guests: Leigh Hopwood: Chief Executive of the Call Centre Management Association Dave Mills: NHS specialist at EVAD Tim Callington: Director of technology firm Flipside
Producer: Nick Holland Studio Managers: James Beard & Rod Farquhar Production Coordinators: Siobhan Reed & Iona Hammond Editor: Hugh Levinson
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.3 | Hello, welcome to the program. |
| 0:07.3 | Strange, isn't it? |
| 0:08.1 | The easier it is to connect with people these days, |
| 0:11.0 | the harder it seems to get in touch with a business when you need to. |
| 0:17.5 | If you're calling about your home phone or broadband, press 1. |
| 0:22.2 | If you are calling to cancel an appointment, please press 2. |
| 0:26.6 | This comment line is automated. |
| 0:28.6 | Please hold. |
| 0:30.7 | Your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order it was received. |
| 0:36.0 | Remember, most requests can be done quicker and cheaper online. |
| 0:40.6 | To report suspicious or nuisance contacts, press 5. For general inquiries, press 3. Let me get you to someone |
| 0:49.4 | who can help. Unfortunately, all our agents are busy at present and not unable to answer your call. |
| 0:55.6 | Well, we've all been there, have we not? |
| 0:58.5 | And in fact, one of those is in fact a BBC switchboard. |
| 1:01.8 | We can moan about it, but companies have a reason for designing the systems they do. |
| 1:06.7 | And things change extremely quickly and indeed did change in the pandemic. |
| 1:10.6 | So we really thought we |
| 1:11.6 | should look into contacting businesses. Do they really have to hide the phone numbers from us? |
| 1:18.2 | We have connected with three people in the contact business, so let us meet them. And first, |
| 1:22.9 | Lee Hopwood, who is chief executive of the Call Centre Management Association. |
| 1:28.0 | Now, Lee, let's go before pandemic, so we're not talking how things have changed in the last |
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