Originally Posted by
DynamoNED
@dr.walrus: Being a computer science grad & mathematician, I see it as a massive queueing theory problem. With any queue, you can optimize throughput (i.e. customers satisfactorily served) if you can do some pre-sorting. Of course, most systems do this through their initial phone support trees (press 1 for x), but the problem ultimately is that you can't quantify how easily a customer's problem can be resolved without first having them talk to a representative, at which point it's too late to pre-sort their problem. If there were some heuristic for determining the relative difficulty of a customer's problem before they reach a representative, it would allow for pre-sorting and allow them to be connected to the proper level of technical support. Of course, I'm making three assumptions (mathematicians are bad about that): That we are attempting to optimize the queue for the customer, that any type of pre-sorting optimization heuristic would be well implemented easily, and that the actual call centers work optimally and as intended (which you have easily shown they don't). One can dream though, right?