For the company that's operating the call center, that's a feature rather than a bug. Anything they can do to just make you go away, including making you wait for two hours in the first place, saves the company money.
That doesn't make sense though, right? Barring regulatory reasons that force companies to have call centers, if the company wanted to provide customer support then they would want to be able to fix customer problems, right? And I've heard call center employees are paid based on minutes on the line so why wouldn't they want to wait a bit longer to solve someone's problem.
> if the company wanted to provide customer support then they would want to be able to fix customer problems
You've clearly never had to deal with a company in a monopolized industry like telecommunications. The call center needs to be there on paper, otherwise it will give people the option to cancel their contracts or even initiate lawsuits because something doesn't work and the company is unreachable.
The call center doesn't need to provide quality support however; as long as it is there on paper it is all that matters. In reality the call center is costing the company money and they'd rather not have you on the phone as long as you keep paying your bill (and most people will keep paying even if they receive subpar or lack of service because of the lack of consumer protection laws in the US, forced arbitration, the fear of a hit on their credit report or the lack of competition).
I'm fully aware of that reason which is why I mentioned "barring regulatory reasons"
The people in this thread are acting like call centers are all bad when the real problem is the monopolized industry and not the customer service agent.
The company wants problems to go away. Fixing them or making it so people don't bother the company about it are both ways to accomplish that goal. And as long as the lack of support doesn't impact sales, it doesn't hurt the company and saves them money in not having to pay for more/better call center staff.
Also in more benevolent companies, providing support over the phone is the most expensive way to provide support. So as much of that that can be shifted to automated systems, better products, etc the better because it avoids the high cost of a call center.
While a call center employee may be paid by minutes on the line (though I think that is rare), they would be penalized for taking too long on a single call or helping too few customers. There's little incentive to spend time on longer more difficult calls when you could just focus your effort on solving many of the simple calls instead.
In the vast majority of consumer-facing sectors, non-captive markets only exist in the pages of introductory economics textbooks.
Even in B2B, most commercial transactions are with an oligopoly, or monopsony, as one party to the transaction. Competition-driven customer service doesn't exist here. For instance, not even enterprise-level customers can get meaningful customer service out of the likes of Google.
