Call center metrics are all about average call length. However, the slowness of the software is largely ignored, in my experience. I worked at a call center once where logging in to the network would take approximately fifteen minutes, depending on workstation, before you could actually start working. They just didn't care. At this particular call center, average handle time was expected to be kept under 6 minutes. One day I had a very good average of under 5 minutes per call, and I received a single inbound call that required use of their translation service (which was a number with which you would dial and initiate a three-way call, and that would translate between you and the caller, with all the requisite delay between communications that one would imagine). That call ballooned into a 45-60 minute ordeal that totally screwed my handle time for the day. The shit cherry on top? The next day, I got bitched at because my handle time for the previous day was too high. When I said "well, that one call was a translator and took like an hour" the only response was "your handle time is too high, don't let it happen again". By the time another week had passed, I had already left the position.

Call center jobs are largely exploitative and demeaning. Outsourcing customer service should be illegal, period.

There only two things I remember about my first day at a large telco. The one relevant to this topic was the call centre. I had never seen cubicles in real life before. Looked absolutely horrible even from the outside. What really made an impression on me, though, was the fact that they had this printed owl on the door. Immediately told everything I needed to know about the place

I'm not familiar with the meaning of a printed owl on a door, why was that significant to you?

> I've called customer service and have to wait 2-3 minutes for the agent to bring up some screen as they apologize and explain "our systems are really slow"

I have a friend who works in a call center. They work 10 hour days with no breaks between calls (the queue is often 40-50 people deep). (They do get the federally-mandated breaks of course.) "Our systems are really slow" is 100% true, but is also probably a welcome break for the agent. So if you are the clever software engineer that goes in and removes the sleep(180s), that's probably great for a few hours until all the call center agents burn out and leave early and use their spare time to start organizing a union. (Of course, if you save 2 minutes a call with software, you can just give people a mandatory 1 minute break between calls and come out ahead -- a true win/win. But that would require that the software team and the call center management team coordinate, and I don't think that's ever happened once in the history of large companies. You'd be the first!)

Perhaps I’m totally going Euro but shouldn’t the MBA in charge at least try to measure employee happiness, churn and absence to try and measure if the work is fulfilling? I work at a large listed insurer and I know nobody shits on the hard work customer facing colleagues do. It’s hard work, with often old IT and usually customers outside of the fast track that have unique needs. Our senior management is motivated to help say once a year to keep a feeling for both customer and colleagues etc.

I would split your point in two dimensions: 1. Software should support efficiency and speed. (We often fail at that.) 2. Tough jobs exist and it’s up to the employer to make them worthwhile and at the least prevent burn-out.

Often there's a lot of insight to be gained by reading what vendors and industry publications have to say on a topic.

DDG suggests that this is a leading call centre industry publication. This is their article list:

https://www.connectionsmagazine.com/articles/by-topic/

I've skimmed a couple of sections. There are a couple which look at workplace issues (career & self-improvement, workfroce management). Nothing jumps out immediately, but there might be some hints.

Note that what you find in articles and practices on the ground ... may differ.

Vendors advertising workforce-related systems and services (especially monitoring, tracking, recruiting, etc.), or legal / compliance organisations, could also give some possible insights.

Overall, it's a low-wage, low-skill, but also low-hazard environment (no dangerous equipment, encounters, etc.). Much of it is outsourced to low-cost regions with many English speakers (Philippines, India, Mexican border towns, Florida, etc.). Alternative employment may be scarce, unemployment high.

Change any of those dimensions and you might see conditions improve.

In contrast, look at AutoCad or Photoshop, and ArcGis. Mega complex ui's, what they do is more like programming than office productivity. So user workflow is going to be more difficult.

I've worked on in a large bank doing sales with slow IT systems, (The Mainframe was awesome quick though, shout out to black screens!). The bank coached staff to use there tools in an order and structure their conversations so they'd have buffer for information and systems to be there when needed.

Warehouse work is very repeatable compared to most work with a computer.

I used to joke "AutoCAD is an 800lb angry gorilla sitting between you and your work."

Then I met a UI researcher, hired by Army Corps of Engr to explain the missing productivity, who went way past time & motion to strategies. The interplay between tools and techniques, influencing how people organize their tasks. Matrices to highlight weird noun (line, circle, text) and verb (copy, move, delete) interactions. In other words, he showed how strategies from manually drafting did not translate to CAD and proposed new strategies (metaphors) and training appropriate for the new medium. Then validated his ideas with usability testing. Brilliant stuff. Like facepalm obvious once you see it.

Crickets.

Both Autodesk and Bentley Systems were hostile to user centric design based on real world data and lived experiences. The geeks and sales pukes who had never designed or drafted knew what designers and drafters needed, so piss off.

Besides, they're printing money, validating their efforts. And you aren't. So piss off.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

> Both Autodesk and Bentley Systems were hostile to user centric design based on real world data and lived experiences.

That's because customer support is the number #1 variable cost on that kind of software.

If you change anything, you start absorbing customer support calls from your enterprise customers.

This is how I knew that Microsoft doesn't carry support costs for Office and Windows--they rearrange GUIs willingly.

Belated reply, because I like your posts, and I don't want to be argumentative with you. :)

My mentor at that time was an AutoCAD dealer. He (eventually) explained the value added reseller racket to me. Very similar to franchising.

Autodesk and others sloughed off most marketing, sales, inventory, shipping, and tech support onto their dealers. Their reasoning, IIRC, was that while dev cost 7% of revenue, those other activities cost 30%. Why not get rubes to cover that overhead?

Further, turnover in the dealer channel was about 1/3 per year. A typical dealer would refinance their house (or whatever) for a few $100k. Burn thru it trying to get established. And there'd be 2 more wannabe dealers waiting to replace them.

It was very hard to not sell AutoCAD for a loss.

There were a few tricks to surviving and profiting. Consulting, training, and hardware, of course. The most capable productized their AutoCAD addons. The most successful of those then matured out of dealerships and formed their own VAR rackets.

My mentor created Rhino 3D. Most of the tech and code started as AutoCAD addons. Until they had bootstrapped a standalone MVP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_3D

--

This was the 1990s. Autodesk is now the Computer Associates of abandonware graphics programs. Some of those legacy apps probably have enterprisey support contracts, so you're probably right about that. At a guess, it's probably part of the subscription models (everyone trying to copy Adobe's success).

> Belated reply, because I like your posts, and I don't want to be argumentative with you. :)

Quite alright. I don't mind having to defend my positions--downvoters with no comments, however, piss me off. :)

> The most successful of those then matured out of dealerships and formed their own VAR rackets.

Yeowch. :(

I didn't know that Autodesk sloughed off the tech support. I'm not surprised.

I'm reading this comment because I task-switched away from VSCode which is hanging again. Waiting for glitchy software takes you out of the zone and makes it more likely to go to reddit/Twitter/hn and lose a lot more time than the glitch.

Similar observations could be made about jankiness/glitchiness in software. The amount of time burned on fighting misbehaving software has to astronomical, in some cases eclipsing the productivity brought by the features that dev energy was spent on instead of general stability and quality.

Take Photoshop for instance. Just about anybody who spends even a moderate amount of time in it will tell you that even though it's become more capable in the past 15 years, it's also become a lot more frustrating and bug-ridden. Personally speaking, I would be just as if not more productive using something like Photoshop 7/CS1/CS2 than I would be with Photoshop CC.

I've become a bit skeptical that the "loading, please wait" delays are real. It seems like they're often used for upselling me to some other product, while I'm just trying to get my current one fixed.

Interesting point.