We’ve all been there. Something goes wrong, so you call customer service. What answers is a bizarre, arcane mess of an answering machine where you have to puzzle out exactly how company x categorizes customer issues when all you want is to talk to a human being. Saying “Complaint” cuts through all of that, but you might need to wait on hold for a bit. Just make sure you’re nice to the person on the other end.
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This is entirely dependent on the phone system and this will not work a lot of the time.
Phone systems I have managed or installed will never work with this.
So, I work in the call center industry, and sometimes this is true. I’ve spoken to hundreds of companies over the years about how they do their IVR (the thing you hear before talking to a person).
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If the IVR is speech enabled and asks an open ended question like “how can I help you”, there’s likely an option to say agent/representative/supervisor
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If you get a list of options, there’s likely a hidden option to reach an agent, but what you press will vary by company (typically 9, 0, or *) and there’s no guarantee you’ll get there any faster. It might actually be slower, because you are likely to be put into a “catch all” group and might even be more likely to require getting transferred.
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Random tip, but # is commonly used as a terminator when typing digits. So if you’re typing your date of birth, CC info, or whatever, press # and you won’t have to wait the extra few seconds for it to “decide” if you’re done. I also press it if I fat finger some digits and need to start over quicker.
The system we deploy (Amazon Connect) is used by the likes of Intuit, Delta Airlines, Capital One, etc. though my company didn’t deploy any of those in particular.
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I just curse out the machine voice with all my pent-up frustration until it sends me to a real person and then it’s easier to be kind to the person who rescued me from robot hell.
Kind of like the phonecall version of screaming in your pillow, sounds practical!
I’ve used this.
Clearly and plainly curse once. Just a simple
Fuck…and it seems* to get me somewhere.
*SurvivorBias, probably, but don’t make it weird.
This used to work better, but some places still detect curse words and cut through the phone tree.
Hitting 0 works a lot of the time still too. Like, fuck all this just let me talk to a person.
Unless you are asking for the address or business hours, you need to talk to a real person. Just let me get to that part faster and I’ll be less annoyed when I get there.
on Lemmy??
Complaint
hello, my name is expatriado, how may i help you today?
My soup is cold
have you tried turning it off and on again?
The company I used to work for you could say “agent” or press 0, but you had to do it many times because it would keep trying to make you play along. At the start of Covid in 2020, the call centers were totally overwhelmed, so someone decided to change that path to say “sorry, I don’t know what you want, goodbye” and hang up.
Surprisingly, that change caused a marginal reduction in call volume, which was the goal. So, when the call centers stabilized later in the year, Finance balked at any suggestion that the decision be reversed unless someone came up with an idea to offset the cost of the increase in volume it would cause. It stayed like that for 2-3 years and was still very controversial when it was finally put back to the way it was before Covid.
I just had to do this with FedEx. At my old job, I used to call FedEx 2-3 times a week to get assistance over production stopping shortages for a medical device company. I used to have to say agent about 3 times and it would go through. I no longer work that job, and a few years have passed. I had a very urgent FedEx item that I needed to talk to a person about. I said agent, representative, human probably 10-15 times. It eventually told me it couldn’t understand and hung up. I was fucking heated because I know it used to work and they took that feature away!
“Representative” works on some other systems
