Every heard of "systems thinking" and "failure demand"

[#1]

These 2 terms are no gaining ground, especially in the public sector - basically it turns various concept previously held around - traditionally if a call centre got 100 calls a hour but could only handle 90, they'd get more staff.
With Systems thinking you would analyse the calls to see if you could avoid them - thus"failure demand"
Why am I raising this?  Well this morning I had no sync - nothing, and no way online, so I called up - only to get a recording saying there was a 20 minute queue.
Luckily my wife was visiting friends, she went online, found the service announcement that there were issues, and the advice was to leave the router off for at least 30 minutes - I had only switched mine off for about 10.
Now, this may not have been my cause, but you can bet good money that that is the 1st thing I'd be told to try if I waited the 20 minutes - I know, I work in IT customer support myself.
But if there had been a "press 5 for latest service announcements" on the phone - I would have heard this, and prevented me hanging on for 20 minutes (this is I hadn't got my wife to go online) - how many people in the queue were being told the same thing? 
By reducing the volume of calls, customers with issues that were not covered by this issue would have had a much reduced wait.
Just a thought, that's all.
Eserim

[#2]

Quote

But if there had been a "press 5 for latest service announcements" on the phone -

This could be used for several " fixed scenarios" in the plusnet call system.... however, there should also be another " Press 9 " to return to the menu, at the end of the service announcements, so that if they did not apply to the callers problems, they would not have to redial, but be put back in the queue they were originally in... (albiet further down the line) !

[#3]

I thought I'd heard somewhere recently that this sort of thing was being considered for the call handling system changes next year.
I'm sure someone from the Comms team will be able to advise on that.

[#4]

Hi there,
We used to have a dedicated Service Status line, but it was very rarely used.
We're currently looking at changes to our IVR and telephone systems, so are considering a few of these strategies. 

[#5]

Quote from: Mand

We used to have a dedicated Service Status line, but it was very rarely used.

Probably because the number wasn't publicised sufficiently!

[#6]

Possibly so, but if we have this sort of thing on the main IVR we won't need to publicise more numbers, and customers will only have to remember one.

[#7]

Absolutely right.
If you get this on the IVR would it be possible to have the first greeting message announce that there are open service status announcements when appropriate?

[#8]

It's something we're looking at, based on number identification (for instance identifying the exchange and playing a message if there's an MSO declared on that exchange).
Nothing has been decided yet though, so I can't make any promises.