Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

One of my pet peeves, as a tech support person, was the habit of many agents to make up arbitrary times by which their customer's problem would be repaired. One of their favorites was "two to twenty-four hours." Any problem would be fixed in two to twenty four hours with emphasis on the twenty-four,  by which time their shift would be over and they wouldn't have to explain to the customer why the problem was still happening.

The truth was that our systems had gotten faster, so that if a phone problem wasn't fixed in about one hour, something had gone wrong and the problem wasn't going to be fixed at all unless an agent did something about it.

I disagree that it's easier to limit an agent's power to help a customer than it is to train the agent how to use that power properly. I'll tell you more about that tomorrow. 

Further reading:  Tech support center vs. call center?