If your phone call is in a queue, blame Agner Krarup Erlang. Erlang was an engineer for the Copenhagen Telephone Company who published the first paper on "queuing theory" in 1909, as a way of working out the optimum number of switchboards required to serve a particular area. Queuing theory is now a growing academic sub-discipline, with courses, journals, consultancies and conferences.
It is increasingly applied to everyday things such as traffic jams, supermarket queues and hospital bed rotation. The call-centre is its purest manifestation. The theory deals with situations in which customers arrive in what is called the "Poisson distribution" - unpredictable numbers, at variable intervals, needing varying periods of service.
The whole point of the call-centre is to get the customer served and offline as quickly as possible. Its workers are taught to use scripted familiarities (such as introducing themselves by their first names), polite "fillers" ("just searching for you . . . sorry to keep you waiting") and listening noises ("uh-huh"). These help to standardise the behaviour of customers as well as workers.
Companies will claim that queuing theory allows them to serve customers more efficiently. However, "efficiency" also means cutting costs and targeting priority customers. Some US firms ask callers to key in credit-card details, so that they can fast-track valued customers and fob off others with recorded messages. New technology is being developed to target the impatient, by connecting more quickly anyone who shouts, swears or jabs at the phone keys.
Faced with these divide et impera tactics, we callers need to act together. Queuing theorists try to design a "good enough" service that cuts down on workers' "idle time" without inducing too much "baulking" or "reneging" (customers deciding not to join a queue if they think it will take too long, or giving up if they get tired of waiting). So we need to baulk and renege more often. If you phone a call-centre and get put in a queue for more than a minute, hang up. The companies, which monitor all calls, should get the message eventually and employ more workers, improving their lives and ours. Frustrated callers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but those hours listening to Muzak.
Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University
