Please Hold. Your Call Is Very Important To Us

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Thank you for calling Your Non-International Bank!

For Swahili, please press 1.
For Gaelic, please press 2.
For Ebonics, please press 3.
For Antarctican, please press 4.
For English, please stay on the line.

Please listen carefully to the following options:

To give us more of your money, please press 1.
To transfer some of your money in our holding to another place in our holding, please press 2.
To donate to our Xmas party, please press 3.
To pay late fees, please press 4.
To pay late fees on late fees, please press 5.
To check your balance, please press 6.
To inquire about a high interest rate loan, please press 7.
To speak to a customer service representative, please input your account number followed by the pound sign.

beep-boop-badeep…

Thank you. You entered xxxx-xxx-x-xxxx-x, is that correct? For no, press 1. For yes, press 2.

Thank you. For identification purposes, please enter your social security number, followed by your date of birth, followed by the hour you were born, followed by (the square root of 76 / 17) + 5, followed by the pound sign.

Thank you! Your call is very important to us, please stay on the line and the next available customer service representative will answer your call in the order it was received! Approximate wait time is: 4 minutes and 30 seconds!

insert midi muzak that’s been taped from a scratched record

3 minutes later:

Thank you! Your call is very important to us… Approximate wait time is: 6 minutes!

5 minutes later:

ring ring ring

HimynameisJohnthankyoumumblemumblemumblehelpyoutoday?

Yes, hi. I’m calling to _______.

Okay. Can I get your account number please?

Uh, yeah, sure. Here it is… again.

And your SSN and DOB please?

Didn’t I go through all this already?

It’s just a precaution, sir.

Fine, here:

Okay, I have your information, howcanIhelpyou?

I need to ______.

I’m sorry sir, I am in department X, you need to speak to someone in department Y.

ARGH! Fine, can you transfer me over there?

I’m afraid not sir, but here’s their number…

click

22

I just spoke to Dell last night. I’m continually impressed with how they maintain such a standard of ever-lowering quality of tech support.

My personal favourite part is the expressions of onlookers as I yell into my cell phone, in progressively louder, clearer terms: “No. NO. NO! NO! [pause] Yes. YES. YES! YES!”

23

Ah…

I work for a small startup company that develops software for controlling those systems! Our immediate customers are big companies (size of Dell, although they’re not one of our customers). Amazing what you learn from doing this. One thing I discovered very early is that our customers can be very adamant about stopping callers from reaching a live agent.

Apparently some rather unthinking companies figure they can save money with an automated system that pisses off callers without helping them…

In defense of touch-tone and voice recog systems, when they work well, they’re great! No waiting for some moron to misunderstand everything I say. My best example is Cingular’s 411 service, which is automated voice recog. I’ve used it all over the US with no problems. You tell it the city and listing you want and it dials the number!.

In defense of voice systems, they are not easy to write. 99.99% of the commercial SW we use assumes input from a keyboard, card, or other media that is easily readable “computer coding” and output to a screen or printer. Try to think of machine interfaces in your life that are not visual. I bet you can’t think of any besides the telephone.

So, we don’t have a large number of SW designers with familiarity in “VUI” (voice user interfaces). Very few people have done much thinking about it. Most of them are not working for the really big companies that went off and tried to do it themselves, with varying levels of awfulness.

Many of these companies just tried to make their VUI like a voice version of the menu on a web page. Doesn’t work. Give someone more than 3 choices and they forget all of them.

Besides, a computer and screen makes us think of a piece of paper. We instinctively react in a certain way. We can make choices from a menu, get repetitions, etc. We almost always type or use the mouse for input; that’s fairly precise.

Everything with a computer or a piece of paper is something we’re conditioned to react to as being non-human.

In comparison, a phone (and this is the key forgotten factor) makes us think of people. Well, granted, I sometimes yell at my computer but that’s because I forget it’s a machine. Phones are even worse. When the voice system doesn’t recognize what we said, we get mad! When it doesn’t have the option we want, we think it’s not paying attention to us! It’s a very serialized way of delivering information, so we’re always getting lost!

Anyone who designs VUIs and forgets this stuff (or more likely, never thinks about it) is gonna deliver a bad system. bad, bad.

Which seems to be what’s happening everywhere.

Now me, given the choice between waiting on the phone for an hour or having a good voice recog system, I’d take the voice system. It helps with simple tasks and gets you to a live agent for complex ones. My rough guess is that all customer service follows the 80-20 rule I observed in computer tech support: 80% of the calls are simple, and 20% are hideous.

Another way of looking at it is that you can probably automate 80% of the calls, which leaves your human reps a lot more time to answer the tough calls. You don’t wait on the phone, and the company learns it can afford to offer good customer service.

But, we’re not there yet.

24

This is easily explained by the fact that insurance companies make their money be collecting premiums. They do not make their money by paying claims. Since the company’s job is to make money, the outcome is obvious.

25

Just wanted to add a pointer I’ve come across in my experiences with automated systems:

Hitting 0 or * at any point will usually bypass the menus and redirect you to an operator. It may not be the CSR you need to speak with, but they can normally redirect your call much faster than it would take to navigate the automated system.

I have noticed lately though that they seem to be catching on and more and more companies are removing that option, or burying it as option 5 or 7 or something, forcing you to listen to the entire menu first.
And anecdotally: I used to work in the call center/email destination point for a large company whose unspoken creed was that callers were to be redirected to the website, while the website directed inquisitive parties to call in (though they made the contact numbers difficult to locate, and periodically moved them around). Same with the emails… there were response trees we used to quickly fill in a reply based on what we determined the email was about after a brief skimming. Any attempts at customer service or tech support through email was redirected to the website FAQ’s.

Also: any concerns, ideas, or other input was systematically ignored, despite the policy of informing the person that we’d “pass it on”. Passing it on was bizspeak for deleting it.

26

Whenever you offer someone a choice from a menu, the menu must be exhaustive. It surprises me how often, “OTHER” is not a choice.

27

Someone just sent me a link to a list of phone numbers and “secret numbers” to press to get a human voice on the line. You might want to bookmark this page for future reference!

I figure this is perfect timing for a wonderful Thanksgiving gift to all of us who are, shall we say, no fans of voice mail systems.

28

If you want to talk to a Spanish speaking man, press Juan.
If you want a preposition, press 2 or 4.
If you have recently had a meal, press 8.
If you would like to say “no” in German, press 9.
If you are angry, please press the “pound” sign.