Wait a Moment’s crowdsourcing could see the end of waiting in a phone queue

As much as we would prefer otherwise, occasionally we have to ring up a customer service helpline and talk to an actual person to get something done. The problem is that so does everyone else, and you could be stuck waiting for forever-and-a-day. Have you ever tried to get in touch with HMRC? It’s not fun.

Launching today is Wait a Moment, a website than aims to do away with all the long call times and help you get through to someone easily and quickly. It utilises crowdsourced information on wait times and analyses it to find out when is the best time for people to be ringing up, and when you’ll just be sitting around waiting for hours on end. Just search the company and you’ll have the information at your finger tips.

Let’s go back to the example of HMRC. Unless you can ring up before 9am, you’re better of not ringing on a Monday. In fact any day after 4pm is when the waits start to get rather long, so you’re better off getting it done as early as you can. Surprisingly the quietest day to give them a ring is Saturday, with the average wait hovering below three minutes until 4pm.

The only real issue is that the scale of waiting times is rather low, and eight minutes plus could mean anything from eight minutes and five seconds to six and a half hours. The site is currently expanding to include popular tourist destinations, but it would be nice if they could have an indicator of much larger waits — if they are relevant to a particular number that is.

In any case, this is a pretty useful tool, and frankly anything that can stop us listening to that god awful hold music is more than welcome.

Image: Kai Chan Vong, Flickr