[graf_von_anonym]

I think you're probably ignoring the fact that the agent was just doing their job. Of course, what their job actually is, and what you think it is are almost certainly two different things.

When you call a call centre you want them to do the thing that they do. Flog you car insurance, move money from your account in the Caymans into your checking account, purposefully mislead you as to the nature of the problem with your internet, have you put on some sort of register, the usual. When a person in a call centre answers a call the agent has to answer the call in a particular way, and that way is almost invariably related to some crude metric involving time or ticking boxes. Call centres, be they "in house", outsourced, or offshore are expected to answer calls according to targets. These targets are numeric, and are always things that can be tracked on a spreadsheet. I mean, just for fun, let us ask "how can we measure delight?".*

So that said, what does get measured? Call times, log rates, repeat calls. Technical support does this, customer services do this. Retentions or Cancellations or whatever they are called in any number of firms, be they mobile telephony internet or car insurance do it, but add bonuses and minimum expectations for things like "customers saved" and "expected revenue shortfall incurred by retention reductions". Sales are usually on a commission basis, there having been questions raised about behaviours under systems that require minimum sales, but some organisations still have them. These numbers, every one of them, from length of a call to time spent in administration have hee-haw to do with how happy you or I are as a customer.

Don't get me wrong, doing the job properly and efficiently will usually produce satisfied customers, and barring the vagaries of the box-ticking exercises this might even be sufficiently prompt as to allow the agent to complete the call in a time that adheres to their expected call profile. If the issue is at all difficult then there's a temptation to fob the customer off, it's inevitable, because the consequences of helping the customer properly outweight the benefits as far as the agent is concerned.

"Fie!", you say. "That's completely unacceptable!". That may well be. It's still your fault. Motivated staff cost money. Keeping staff motivated requires recognising them as humans, rather than machines for interpreting dialect and plugging values into computer screens. One of those processes is abandoning scripts for calls, but that brings the attendant risk of people straying from those scripts. Variation breeds poor customer service, raises call times. You can see long call times in Excel, but there's no way to track how happy someone was as a result. Now, don't get me wrong, they are trying; there's a good chance that almost everyone on this forum who's talked to Virgin Media has received one of those emails that asks if we'd recommend Virgin Media to a friend. Though the obvious point here is the scope of the metric; two measures, a range from 1 to 10. That kind of granularity does not good policy make. More to the point, my suspicion is that it's sourced from an American organisation, because the septics are amazingly fond of trying to make numbers out of intangibles, so I'd guess 70% is the "pass" mark rather than 50%. The thing is that all this stuff costs money, and that requires either squeezing already narrow profit margins or charging customers more. Given the choice, most organisations will just eat up the discontent, smooth out the grumbling where it flares with a discount here, an apology there. It's easier, organisationally, to treat everyone equally badly and then soothe the ones who complain until they either stop complaining or leave. "I'd be perfectly willing to pay £5 extra a month for a quality service" is heard from many a person, but when it comes to the wallet, that £60 is pretty loud. It will get louder.

Of course, you don't have to listen to me. I intensely dislike everyone dissimilar to me, and since I'm a beautiful unique snowflake I'm turned against anyone without an icy exterior and a heart made of grit.

* If your answer involved electrodes, PET, seretonin level monitoring or blush response you are a) most of the way there, and b) advised to remember that chicks don't dig Mad Science on the first date; A lesson I have learned the hard way.