If you call an enterprise after hours, you will typically be told how really important your call is to them.  After next being informed of the precise business hours of the enterprise, you will be instructed to call back when they are open for business and it is convenient for them to talk to you.  An option to leave a call-back number or even automatically capturing the number of the calling party is rarely done. This is often the same enterprise that is spending billions of $s to “talk” to these same consumers. Yet, when the consumer is making an attempt to talk to the enterprise, the response is to tell the consumer to “go away and call us when it is more convenient for us”.  

This situation appears to be a simple break-down of communications between the enterprise marketing and call center management organizations. The basic technology to leave a message (voice mail) has been readily available for the last 25 years.  The tiniest businesses in the country routinely do this.  If you call them after hours, you can leave a voice mail and someone will call you back next day.  Just capturing the number of the caller solves the problem most of the time and using CallerID would accomplish this.  The enterprise would still need to pull off the numbers from the messaging system.  This would seem like an opportunity for the vendors to provide a service that makes this easy to do.  Automation of the pulling of the caller’s contact information would seem like the primary thing that is needed.  The enterprise would still need to have a CSR call back the consumer.  The call-back service would then automatically call the customer and connect to CSRs as the are available.