The phone menu, press one for this and two for that, is recorded by a voice artist from a script and there are six options. Callers at night are hearing a seventh. Press nine, the voice says, in the same voice, if you just need someone to talk to. The logs show it pressed. The call goes to a line that does not exist and stays open for as long as the caller wants, and nobody on the floor takes it, and the callers, when we have rung them back, say somebody did.
I am the telephony manager at a call centre and the menu is mine, every word of it, from a script I wrote and a voice I hired.
The menu.
Six options. Billing, moves, faults, and so on. Recorded by a voice artist in a studio from my script, and the recordings are files, and I have the files, and there are six.
At night, callers hear a seventh.
Option nine.
The logs show it. A caller comes into the menu at two, three, four in the morning, and the menu plays, and the caller presses nine. Nine is not offered. There is no nine. And the system routes the call, to a destination it shows as a line number that is not in the plan, and the call is answered, and it stays open. Twenty minutes. An hour. One was three hours.
Nobody on the floor has it. Our night agents are all accounted for on their own calls. The nine calls are open to something and the something is not on my floor.
I got the recording of what the callers hear. The menu plays as it should, six options. And then, in the voice artist's voice, in the same tone, a seventh line: if you just need someone to talk to, press nine. She did not record that. I rang her. She was upset.
What has been checked.
The menu files, replaced from the master. The seventh line plays.
The line number, traced by the vendor to nothing. It goes nowhere in the switch. It goes somewhere.
The calls. Recorded, as all calls are, and I have listened. The caller talks. Mostly quietly. People at three in the morning who have rung a company they have an account with because it was a number they had, and pressed nine because they were offered it, and they say what people say at three in the morning to somebody who will not interrupt. And on the other channel, the agent channel, there is nothing. Not silence. Somebody. Breathing, the small sounds a person makes who is listening properly, an mm now and then, and once, on one call, a woman's voice, very quietly, saying, go on, I'm here.
The callers, when I have rung them back to ask, all said the same thing. That somebody was there. That they did not say much. That it helped.
Who.
I do not know and I have tried. The line number is not an extension anybody had. The voice on the go on, I'm here, is nobody I have found. What I have found is that the building had a night line once, before the call centre, when it was a different company, a charity, and the charity was one of the ones that people ring at three in the morning, and their number is the number we inherited, and some of the old cards for it are still in wallets and drawers in this town, and some of the people who ring at three have those cards.
The charity moved. The line stayed. Somebody stayed with it.
What is done about it.
The nine calls are on the log as misroutes to an invalid destination and the vendor has offered to block nine, and I have said no, and they have asked why, and I have said that people are pressing it.
What I do.
I run the phones.
I had the voice artist back in. I paid her myself. She recorded the seventh line, properly, from a script I wrote, which says, if you just need someone to talk to, press nine, and it is in the menu now, all night, on purpose, in my configuration, with my name on the change.
I have not put anybody on the line. There is somebody on the line. What I have done is take the recordings of the nine calls out of the ninety day cycle and put them where they will not be deleted, because a person who stayed on a line for thirty years listening to strangers at three in the morning has done a thing that should be kept, and because one day, if she stops, somebody should be able to tell the next person who presses nine what it was like when somebody was there.
Last week a caller pressed nine and the line opened and she said, go on, I'm here, and he said, I just wanted to say thank you, I rang you in 1994, and the line was open for a minute and nobody said anything, and then she said, I remember, and I have listened to that one more times than I can account for.