A useful cheat sheet that gives you short cuts to finding a human when dealing with annoying voice mail systems.
I gave the cheat number for Verizon to a co-worker. He’d been trying for three days to get some charges cancelled. He got through on the cheat number and it was fixed by a Real Live Human within 30 seconds.
That’s the kind of testimony money can’t buy. 
Awesome. Thanks!!!
I wonder how long these numbers will be valid before the various companies change them to foil the sudden demand on their actual humans?
Anyone got a way to a person for the Navy Federal Credit Union?
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
As if humans really work inside the complex anymore.
They are all zombies.
Please listen closely as the options have changed to confound you even more!
You know, I can understand being frustrated, but for most places there’s a reason other than “fuck over the customers and make them suffer” to have phone trees. Like, say, get them to the people who can solve their problems rather than transfer them to a random human who now gets stuck with having to transfer them everywhere, probably taking longer than it would have if they’d just used the phone tree in the first place. Hopefully people who read that website understand this and only use it in “I’ve been stonewalled by this company for too long” situations.
I work for a hospital, not one of those companies, but even our department had to have a couple meetings that solely involved reorganizing our phone messages, because impatient people would just hammer “0” or hit the first number they heard, demand that they be helped, and then bitch when the person talking to them has nothing to do with their issue and has to transfer them anyway. We did our best to streamline it and make it as quick and obvious as possible but I still feel sorry for certain people in my department who get the “I don’t want to talk to a machine” types on the phone.
I heard the report on NPR about this website, and though I hadn’t seen it yet, it was in the back of my mind as I fought with UPS over a package delivery last week. The advice I remembered was to ignore the prompts and keep saying “operator” if it was a voice-prompted system. I only had to say it twice. Awesome.
To get through to a human at Blue Cross, wait until 8pm or so. That way the volume of traffic has dropped massively. Then, when the system starts, punch in zero several times. This will kick you into the human-interaction system. Last time I did this, I got our cards changed and updated in 3 minutes.
“Agent” works for UPS (not on the list), although you might have to be insistent. If it makes you feel better, you can even say stuff like “Fcuk you, bitch, I said ‘AGENT’”.
Ferretherder, I know where you’re coming from, but for the most part I use websites to find the info I need. I only ever call if I really need to speak to a person, and mostly that’s UPS and FEDEX, and then it’s almost always to reroute or reassign a package. If they want me to stay in their call tree then they’ll have to make it more efficient or actually give me the option to speak to a person, which is often not an option without listening to a lot of useless crap first.
A well designed phone tree should be accompanied by a well designed website on which you can accomplish anything the phone could do.
When I call a company, I want to speak to a person, and it’s because I already know that my question can’t be answered or my problem can’t be resolved by an automatic system.
When I had to call mortgage companies all the time (job at a title company) I would just hit pound until I got a human. I don’t remember having to be transferred.
Skimming the thread titles, I initiall read this as “How to Find a Hitman When Calling Major Companies.” Needless to say, I was very interested in reading the thread…
Operator was the key word when someone inside Sprint PCS stole my credit card number and assigned it to someone elses account. You call, E-Bitch (I think her name was Claire) answers. You say “operator” in your most authoratative voice and get transferred to India or Pakistan where you can’t understand “Bob”'s English at all, but “Bob” recognizes the word “Manager.” He tries to tell you something that you can’t understand and horribly mispronounces your very simple English name. So you say a little louder, slower and more condiscencingly “Maannnaaaagerrr!!” and get transferred to North Carolina (I am guessing from the accent) where they are sorry that one of their assclown employees put your credit card information onto someone else’s account, but they can’t take it off the wrong account until you give them the account number of the account that isn’t yours. Eventually, you call your credit card company and use your newfound secret word “operator” and say the magic words “Sprint PCS” and “Credit Card Fraud” and the nice people at VISA give you back the thousands of dollars Sprint PCS stole from you and set up a conference call with the North Carolina branch of Sprint PCS where you get to hear the VISA credit fraud folks tell Sprint PCS that VISA may not be interested in conducting further business with Sprint PCS. I also taught the fraud people at VISA the secret words “operator” and “manager” the best that Sprint PCS could come up with was “no comment”
I work for DirecTV and can tell you that their entry is already invalid. You can’t get to an operator by repeatedly pressing “0” anymore.
Because of this, I get a lot of calls not relating to tech support (which is my department). I guess our department is easier to reach through the automated system than the others.