Biz customers with broken Acer kit might want to sling a call into the technical centre: then put on the kettle and make a cuppa, because they could be on hold for a lot longer than they were expecting. Certainly longer than the half a minute average response time that Jakob Jersild Olsen, veep at Acer's commercial division …

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Wednesday 19th March 2014 09:21 GMT Matt 21

Stats

Well if they lie, oops sorry, I mean, have a rounding problem in their stats like this then it's hard to take any of their other claims very seriously, isn't it?

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1. Wednesday 19th March 2014 10:10 GMT 's water music
  
  Re: Stats
  
  It seems unlikely that they lied and there is nothing in the article which is inconsistent about the reported call stats and the author's experience. It simply underlines that reducing a complex, highly subjective experience isn't very useful. This shouldn't come as a surprise since I assume a greater proportion of the the reg audience have some idea that human brains aren't really wired to easily process probability or any but the simplest of statistical analyses.
  
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2. Wednesday 19th March 2014 10:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Stats
  
  I depends what you class as hold / ASA.
  
  I consumer often starts this when the get the 1st message, a call centre will class it as when you go through to the queue (hence On Hold).
  
  Also it's ASA, sl calling up at 9am Monday morning, as opposed to 3pm on a Thursday, will get very different results.
  
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Wednesday 19th March 2014 09:26 GMT AMBxx

Why the hatchet piece?

Sounds like someone wanted it to be far worse, but found that the service isn't bad at all.

I've no Acer kit, and no axe to grind on either side, but I wish I could get a 2 minute response from every vendor.

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1. Wednesday 19th March 2014 10:25 GMT Matt 21
  
  Re: Why the hatchet piece?
  
  Depends what you mean by response. Most vendors I work with allow me to "log" the problem with almost no delay. Getting to speak to someone who can actually help or getting an engineer on site with the right component on the other hand...........
  
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  1. Wednesday 19th March 2014 13:15 GMT Eradicate all BB entrants
    
    Re: Why the hatchet piece?
    
    Two minutes is much much better than the following experience with Dell (after 2 minutes of being transferred everywhere)
    
    Them: Welcome to Dell support, how can I assist.
    
    Me: I have a 6 month old monitor and the lamp has died.
    
    Them: Have you updated the bios to the latest version?
    
    Me:It's a MONITOR.
    
    Them: I am sorry, unless you have the latest bios we cannot continue troubleshooting your issue.
    
    Cue 15 mins of arguing with a script before hanging up and sending a lengthy tirade to our account manager, who knew less than the script guy.
    
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Wednesday 19th March 2014 10:08 GMT Blergh

What is the median wait time?

From your small sample size an average wait time could be badly skewed by a one off event where their system went down for 30min. You can't get the opposite otherwise you'd be going back in time, so giving us the median wait time will be a more representative figure.

I imagine it probably doesn't make much difference to your results, but it will help us decide if your statistics mean anything. Alternatively if you let us know what the maximum and minimum wait times were along with your already stated average then we can make a guess about how badly skewed your data is from the paltry 12 data points.

Of course you could alternatively try and up your number of data points to something more significant (in the 1000s).

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