Just read this in SmartMoney. There are apps like FastCustomer and LucyPhone that will navigate the purgatory that is most AVRS’s (automated voice response systems). FastCustomer even gives you the option to have THEM call YOU!! What evil sorcery is this?
I’ve downloaded, and although I can’t say that I can’t wait to try it, next time I am on hold I will try it!
Automated phone systems are high on my list of inventions the world didn’t need.
How do those systems that call you back work? I would envision it works something like this:
– You call…
– Your app starts working through the maze…
– Meanwhile, you hang up and go about your own business…
– Eventually, live person gets on the line…
– Your app rings your phone…
– -- – Now, here’s where I imagine the problem comes in…
– You don’t answer the phone instantly. (Hey, are you sitting right beside your phone, waiting?)
– Live person quickly realises that HE’s the one on hold now!
– Live person, who is not the one who’s interested in having this conversation, has no reason to wait…
– Live person immediately hangs up.
What? It doesn’t happen like that?
They may be evil, but they’re pretty necessary - most businesses that use them have a great diversity of functions the customer might need to access - so the alternatives are:
[ul]
[li]Pay some human to receive and route calls (not a very fulfilling job, and you still have to wait on hold before you talk to the person you want.[/li][li]Publish a long list of direct-dial numbers so people can find and call the service they want (they won’t want to look this up, or they’ll dial the wrong department)[/li][li]Train your staff so that any of them can perform any task (good luck with that - and good luck retaining them if you succeed)[/li][/ul]
If you could have just a short menu of items to choose from, to route your call, that would be okay. That is a good way to use an automated answering system. A few companies actually do that. But look how egregiously so many companies (especially BIG companies) abuse their systems, and their customers, by making their system an automated hell on wires.
The Gold Standard of Bad Phone Systems, by the way, has to be the IRS.
While I understand the need for phone systems I usually do what I can to get around them. I’ve managed to find a few ways to do so.
Punching in your account number ‘wrong’ over and over will usually get you to a human as will hitting zero over and over.
Something else I’ve done is to, right from the beginning, choose the option for ‘new customer’ instead of ‘existing customer’. I’ve found the wait time for them to get a new customer is usually a lot shorter.
Also, more often then not if you choose a different category then the one you actually need you’ll get a person sooner since the one you need is the one everyone else needs as well. I’ve found that often times the random person you end up getting can help you anyways (be it a hardware store or credit card company) and if not, sometimes you can avoid the hold queue if you get transferred internally.
I’ve heard that sometimes the overly complex phone trees are designed to get you to hang up before you actually manage to talk to someone.
Also, who decided that anyone wants to hear “Please hold on, a representative will be with you shortly” every 15 seconds. I can’t remember who it is, but there’s some place I call on a regular basis that plays that message to often that if I’m on hold for more then 5 minutes I have to hangup and try again later since it’s so irritating…and it literally is something like every 15 seconds. I have to assume that whoever programmed the system doesn’t realize how often it’s played.
If they designed things that way deliberately for this reason, I’d say they were probably damn successful too.
That 15-second message is annoying as hell, and there’s plenty else about these phone systems that’s annoying as hell. If it’s really hard to get to a live person (and it certainly IS, way too often), it seems certain that they have designed it this way on purpose.
It is said (or is it just a cynical urban legend?) that once you enter your account number (or other identification), you get shunted into one of several sub-trees according to how “important” a customer you are. If you are a “good” customer (however that is defined), you get transferred to a live person, or at least a useful tree of sub-menus. If you aren’t such a “good” customer, it’s Phone Tree Hell for you!
Anyone knowing anything, like, actually factual about this?
ETA: Another annoying as hell habit at some companies: Their phone messages include lengthy “announcements” that you MUST sit and listen to, that you cannot interrupt to get to the menu quicker. For example: "We are sorry, but we are closed at this time. If you wish to contact us during business hours [insert lengthy description of open hours here and lots of other information you didn’t want to hear] . . . . blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah . . . . .
Then FINALLY you get to start hearing your menu of options.
People who try to bypass phone systems make me wish I had a button to send a jolt through the phone.
If I had a nickel for every person I have had to transfer back to the appropriate queue just because they got button happy, I could retire early. (I’ve been working phones as part of my job for 20 years.)
Yes, I was able to pick up immediately. No, I am not the person who can help with your specific issue. If you press that button again, you are just going to get transferred back to the end of the queue again.
In many cases, the line I was manning was for emergencies. At my current place of employment people most often try to get through on the physician specific lines that must always be kept open in case someone’s life is literally on the line.
If these apps work at all, I would love to find out how often they actually get you connected to the department you actually need.
I don’t have time for the full rant now, but don’t get me started on people who don’t listen to the messages.
So many of the calls I have taken over the years would have ended before they started if people had simply listened. Then I could have helpe someone who, you know, needed it.
Especially when there is an outage. “Yes, there is an outage, as stated in the message. Yes, it applies to you, as we detailed in the message. No, there is not an ETA. The message didn’t lie to you.” Multiply this by about 70 over the course of eight hours during an extended outage. It’s maddening.
There are several companies(I’m looking at YOU paypal!) that don’t even have a contact phone number readily displayed. Oh you can find it with google sure, but they apparently really do not want you to call.
Several times my parents have dealt with erroneous billing issues with utilities that have no office space(just a PO box) and almost totally automated customer service through email. Then if you do get a human being they say they are only to take payments by phone(which they charge for!) and they have no authority to do anything and there is no one there that can. These are cheapo utility resellers usually.
It really is becoming a big problem.
My pet peeve is “Your call is important to us”. A blatant lie since if it were, they would answer it sooner. The IRS is in a unique position to empty your bank accounts so they really don’t care if you hang up. Maybe the tax revolt wouldn’t be as severe if they acted as if they did care.
Phoning INS for a simple question results in huge delay, but I found a simple work-around: Call the INS Fraud Hotline and ask them the question! About half the time they’ll hang up angrily without answering the question, but they could do this 95% of the time and it would still be faster than “waiting for the next available representative.” (I can appreciate that someone may want to flame me for this practice. Please do so in BBQ Pit so I can tell more about INS.)
Lately I sometimes get a cheerful intelligent agent after only short delay. But anyway, IRS budget cutting is a problem. If you can think of any intelligent explanation whatsoever for such cuts, you might want to mention it in the GD thread To any Libertarian. Would you authorize a new $1 billion agency to save $10 billion? or one of its antecedents. No one else has done so.
Our company’s internal help desk phone system is like this. Before you can ever talk to someone at the help desk, you get at least three lengthy messages reminding you that you don’t need to call the help desk to have your password reset and here’s how you can do it yourself. And you can’t skip past them!
The other one that drives me crazy is “Please listen carefully as some of our menu items have changed.” My doctor’s office does this and they haven’t changed anything in at least the last ten years.
I disagree completely.
Yes, you might sometimes have to wait on hold for a while before you’re attended to, but at least the IRS actually makes it quite easy to talk to a human being about your issue. I’ve had to call them a few times in the last couple of years, and while each call required quite a long wait on hold, in each case it was pretty easy to navigate the menu, and it was also easy to get to talk to a person.