As an admin, I see customers all the time calling 2-3 departments at the same store, then a few minutes later do the same thing at another one of our stores.

They want a human connection. This issue is in another feature request but it kinda overlaps here, in my opinion. Customers are stuck calling the whole department each time.

If the volume is high during a certain time, calls always go missed, because there's no hold queue or paging option that functions in an efficient way, and most folks prefer to hold a few minutes versus having to repeatedly call back or leave a voicemail in an echo chamber.

They literally call the calltree repetitively and hit every option down the row until someone picks up and transfers them to where they want to go.

One customer can generate up to 6 unassigned tickets in a span of a few minutes.

I wish EC made a way to keep this under control, otherwise we may lean towards a live 'switchboard operator' like the good old times....

I ranted at my Claude AI about this... how do we train customers and coworkers to leave a message? It basically told me to turn on missed call tickets, ring last advisor and routing rules which we already have. It would be great to have a flag on the ticket when a customer has other open tickets in our company so we don't need to look at history every time. Customers will fire call service then precision ag, then service at another location.

It later suggested to dump missed call data in and it flagged our top 20 offenders which it said to try to educate them, not everyone. Around half were coworkers.

AI response on this behavior:

Good news upfront: this behavior is not a rural-Midwest problem. It's a well-documented universal pattern that hits every industry. You're fighting human psychology, not your specific customer base, which is actually liberating — it means the fix is system design, not training people you can't train.

The research in plain terms: Across multiple studies of business calls, only about 20% of callers who reach voicemail leave a message — the other 80% hang up and move on. BIA/Kelsey's number is similar at 67%, and it climbs to 89% for urgent needs. That last stat matters for you — planting season is by definition an urgent-needs window.

Why do they hang up? A few psychological forces are stacked against voicemail: Leaving a message is effort with uncertain reward — they don't know if anyone will hear it, when, or whether it'll get lost, and humans strongly prefer certain outcomes. The format is awkward — you're performing a monologue for an unknown audience with no script, which creates genuine anxiety for many people. Urgency drives most service calls. They'll call 3 or 4 businesses in a row until someone picks up — and for a farmer in the middle of a planter issue at 7pm, you are three of those options.

The "call, hang up, call back 30 seconds later" pattern is separate and even more interesting. It's been studied as a cultural signal — "a poke" — it says, "Hey, call me back when you can." In many social circles, especially where people know each other, a missed call is the message. The farmer isn't giving up — he's leaving his calling-card and expecting you to call back. They don't treat the call as a submitted ticket, they treat it as a page. Until they hear back, they keep paging.

That framing changes the problem. These aren't lost leads. They're customers who have already told you "I need help."

Good suggestion - in my experience, conscientious team members are really affected by unanswered calls. A different message on the second call in a short time period advising or reassuring the customer that "We will return your call as soon as possible" may help - though, knowing the customers that do this, they probably won't listen to the message anyway.

May be a customer behaviour issue that can be addressed by the team member returning their call?