I agree that just pushing numbers like crazy does not help.

Your comments about operating hours is very interesting. For my Internet provider, I call them late at night. What happens is that my call goes to India. That is fine by me because the call centres there give me the impression of being overstaffed. As a consequence, you get straight through.

I used to work in a call centre for a state automobile club, dealing with insurance and roadside service membership quotes, sales, amendments and cancellations. Our busiest times were Friday afternoon and all day Monday, when people would ring to get cover for the new car they were picking up/had picked up on Saturday morning. But the majority of people who complained about having to wait 20 minutes or more to speak to someone weren’t aware that the call centre operated 7am-11pm, 7 days a week (after being reduced from 24hrs) and they would have gotten almost straight through if they called outside the 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri they thought we were open.

Also, don’t think that if you press 1,1,1,1 (or some other combination) that you’ll bypass the queue and get through quickly to someone who will then transfer you straight to the person who can help you. A lot of places don’t have direct numbers and can only transfer you to the end of the queue for a given department, or if they do have a bypass number, they’ll only use it to transfer someone who’s had genuine business with Dept A, and now also needs to speak to Dept B. If you get sprung trying to jump the queue like this, you might even find yourself being tranferred back to the external number you called and having to go through the menu again!