Melbourne

Ratio of calls to operators. If people are unwell, and/or the place is understaffed, you have a high volume of calls. Low employee retention plays into this too, as it is the cause of being understaffed (and budget), because who wants to stay in a call centre? Especially in gov where you can move around with relative ease.

But also, that's just the gub'mint for ya

I heard they feed multiple calls into the same line with the hold music. It means they can have more people on hold with less lines, but the quality of the line drops with each call added to it.

But that was in the old days, you'd think everything would be internet based now

It's better business to waste your time rather than theirs. Twenty years ago they'd offer to send people home without pay on quiet nights at my call centre. Often it'd get mad busy half an hour later.

Why is there a minimum hold time of 30 minutes when calling any government service? Always “we’re experiencing a high volume of calls”.

It's particularly bad for Centrelink, where you might not even make it to the hold queue, and just get a busy tone/automatic hang-up.

They're basically never not "experiencing an unusually high volume of calls". At some point, you'd think that the high volume of calls would just become the norm. Your average worker is juggling a whole bunch of different people all at once, and that doesn't seem at all sustainable.

And the hold music is terrible.

Tom Scott did a video on it. It used to be better, but newer computerised systems, where they're both using old files, and it's crushed to death because it's cheaper to store/process that way.

As an aside, I feel like the sound quality has also gone downhill. it used to be either clear, or at least somewhat audible, but now, it's just incomprehensible gibberish at times.