Let me make up a guy, because it beats arguing in the abstract. Call him Gary Pesch. He's 41, lives on the west side of Cincinnati, and has a temporary crown that's been clicking against his tongue since Tuesday. He wants to move his Thursday cleaning to the following week. That's the whole request. It takes him fifty one minutes and at the end of it he has moved nothing.
Dante got Virgil to walk him down. Gary gets Ashley, who is a voice file, and who says "got it" before getting anything.
First circle: the room with no door
Limbo. Nobody's punished here exactly, you just wait. The hold music is a solo saxophone playing something that scored a car commercial in 1997, and every twenty two seconds a voice cuts in to say his call is important. It isn't. If it were, somebody would pick it up. Gary knows this. The saxophone knows this. And both people who work that front desk are at Panera until 1:30, both getting the Fuji apple salad.
Second circle: a menu of things you almost want
You get offered everything except the reason you called. Laid out with the confidence of a system built by somebody who has never once dialed it.
- Press 1 for our hours and location, which you already found on Google, which is how you got the number.
- Press 2 for new patient forms.
- Press 3 to hear about our whitening special, running through the end of the month.
- Press 4 for insurance and billing.
- Press 5 to hear these options again, which you will.
Gary is holding a crown in place with his tongue. He wants Thursday to become the following Thursday. Whitening can wait until he has a tooth left to whiten.
Third circle: it swallows everything you feed it
Gluttony. He enters his date of birth. Six digits, clean, no fumbles. "I'm sorry, I didn't get that." It got that. He does it again, slower, pressing hard enough to feel the plastic bottom out. "I'm sorry, I didn't get that." Brief aside, because it explains most of this: trees like Gary's got sold to dental offices by reps who bought lunch and said the word "professional" nine times, and nobody at the practice has dialed their own main line since. Why would they? They're on the inside of it, where the phone rings on a desk.
Fourth circle: money moves at the speed of light
Greed. Press 4 for billing and a human answers in nine seconds. Nine. Gary asks whether she can move an appointment and she can't, she's billing, but she can take a card right now and have a receipt in his inbox before he hangs up. One express lane in the whole building. It runs one direction.
Fifth circle: pressing zero like a lab rat
Wrath. Zero. Zero. Zero zero zero zero. "That is not a valid selection." Gary, who hasn't raised his voice at a coworker in nine years of shared cubicle wall, says a word into his car speakerphone loud enough to startle a man at the next pump.
Sixth circle: the bot that swears it understands you
Heresy, which Dante saved for people who believed a false thing with total conviction. "In a few words, tell me why you're calling." Gary says: reschedule an appointment. "Got it. Billing." He says it again, slowly, the way you talk to a dog that ate something off the sidewalk. "Got it. New patient." The confidence is the crime. A dumb menu at least knows it's a menu.
Seventh circle: back to the top
Violence, self inflicted by now, because he keeps calling back. Billing transfers him to scheduling. Scheduling is a ring that becomes a click that becomes the saxophone. He's at the main menu. Demoted to a stranger. Every digit he entered and every word he said, gone, and the recording greets him like they've never met.
Eighth circle: "approximately four minutes"
Fraud. Your wait time is approximately four minutes. Nineteen minutes later: your wait time is approximately four minutes. That number is a sedative wearing the costume of a measurement, dosed to hold you right up to the edge of where you'd have hung up and called the practice over on Glenway instead.
Ninth circle: the click
Treachery, the betrayal of somebody who trusted you. At 4:58 the system announces that offices are closed and hangs up midway through the word "Monday." Gary calls back to leave a voicemail, because voicemail is what's left. The Numa Small Business Phone Report found that 85 percent of callers who reach voicemail never call back. Gary's in the 85. He didn't decide to be. He just never called again.
The dentist has no idea any of this happened
That's the part that gets me, and Gary being invented doesn't make him less familiar. Ask anybody who has tried to move a cleaning. Nothing about those fifty one minutes reaches the dentist. No ticket. No missed call log either, because technically nothing was missed. The machine picked up. The machine just did nothing with it. A 411 Locals study of 85 businesses found 62 percent of calls to small businesses go unanswered, and the reason a number that big stays quiet is that unanswered calls file no complaint. They stop.
So, the pitch, short. Rocketship answers that phone. Same number the practice has had since 2009, picked up on the second ring at 4:58 on a Friday, by something that knows the hours, knows what a crown re-cement runs, hears "I need to move Thursday to the week after," puts the new slot in Google Calendar and writes his number down. Wants a person instead? It hands him to a person. No menu. Nothing says "press 5 to hear these options again," because nobody in the history of the telephone has ever wanted to hear those options again. Free tier, paid plans from 12 dollars a month. Less than the saxophone costs, I'd bet.
Gary's crown comes out Saturday morning, in a bagel. He finds another practice Sunday night and calls it Monday flat out expecting the tree. Somebody picks up on the third ring. He's so surprised he forgets what he was calling about.