Friday, August 11, 2006

Stuck in a Phone Tree?

Ok, I just said these phone tree things were good, all warm and fuzzy and personal. But service industry phone trees give me the flux. Wall Street Journal recently had an article about how to get around company phone trees. You know, the endless prompts with the humanesque sounding voice telling you to "enter or say your account number....oh I'mmm sorry, I didn't get that, can you try it again?" Bug off!

I never minded automated sounding voices (accept the female voice in parking lots "please take a ticket" I hate her and I curse her out every single time) but these newer voices make too much of an attempt to sound personably like humans. That irks me. The damn prompts never get you where you need to go or answer your situation. So the Journal writes about this web site that helps get us to a real live human, www.GetHuman.com They have some valuable suggestions and a database of secret phone numbers and codes to get to humans in hundreds of companies. This is a must save site.

However, I figured this out already. I have tried my way on several different places from AT&T to UPS. It works. All you have to do when it prompts for a response from you, is just YELL at it. Then, every time I get, "hold for a customer assistant". A human being at last! Somehow yelling "I WANNA TALK TO A PERSON" or anything yelled triggers out of the prompt tree. Try it. It's worked for me and it's fun too. Yayyyyy Real People!

4 comments:

Dustin said...

LOL! I always say "operator" and don't press anything until I get a human. It has always worked for me.

Jackie said...

Dustin, it's more fun to scream at them. So frustrating. Hope you find that web site helpful.

Anonymous said...

You may try to use www.nophonetrees.com. It's very similar to GetHuman, but they take the idea to the next level and their system calls you when operator from selected company waits for you on the line!

Jackie said...

Wow, thanks!