Disney should absolutely be doing better, so please do NOT mistake this reply as making excuses for them. I just want to point out as someone who works as upper level support staff at a call center (albeit a govt one), that there are a lot of valid logistical concerns at play with operating one in this pandemic that have nothing to do with money. Disney’s at the high extreme, but wait times have been high on so many CS lines since the pandemic began for myriad reasons. Social distancing is a pipe dream the way most call centers are set up, as a start...most are cube farms packed tightly in. I know Disney did have a team of WFH agents, but that’s not a magic bullet either—there needs to be infrastructure to support those agents, not just with the call taking, but also for the QA staff evaluating them, trainers, etc. Things can go wrong, too...we had an outage the other day for our Windows RA platform that prevented most support teams from being able to work for 2 days, except those of us with Macs. And for those who remain on site, clusters and outbreaks are par for the course. I’ve lost count of how many we had that I know about, and I know there were way more I didn’t because my support team has been home for long stretches. Even if you’re staffed up as much as distancing will allow (which is generally far less than you should assume), just 1 agent showing up positive will cause all kinds of chaos and service level tanks. Morale is lower even than normal times and call outs are a huge problem.
Again, Disney should absolutely be doing better—there’s no good reason why people should be waiting 4 and 5 hours to get through. I have no doubt that this is driven in part by cost cutting, to their own detriment, and it’s even more unacceptable for an org that has built their brand on CX. But folk should understand that solving this is not as simple as “just hire more people”. Of course, solving complicated logistical problems is ostensibly why the suits get paid so much. Like I said, I’m not playing apologist here. Just offering insight.