The answer I always give to "tell us what you need help with" is "representative" or "speak to a human". I despise the automated systems that respond to that with "before we can route you to a human, we need to know what you're calling about". Fortunately, some of those will take the continued statement of "representative" as a sign that they should give up and give you a human to talk to. Not all of them, though.
replyHave you encountered those voicemail AI customer service representatives? Those can't route you anywhere so you're stuck talking to a robot.
replyI was just trying to schedule my daughter's dentist appointment and had to spend 10 minutes talking to an AI when I could have found a time that worked in 30 seconds with a human. And at the end of the whole process, she got my daughter's name wrong. It was demoralizing.
Most phone systems will put you through to a human if you pound the 0 enough. The better ones will tell the rep that you did so and they know you are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore and you never have to make the case that they’re going to lose $100,000 NPV because they won’t give you a $500 resolution.
replySome of them will also give up and escalate if you do a good enough Rahm Emanuel impression.
replyOh fucking hell yes, how much I hate that shit. Bring back the "press 5 for XYZ" phone trees, I never have problems getting the systems to understand what I'm trying to indicate there.
replyI definitely prefer phone trees the ai agents. Something that has never made sense to me is why we even need most of the phone trees. Could they not just have separate numbers? Billing is X num. CS is Y num. Save the human species minutes for every fucking call.
replyI realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do that.
They're just filters to see if you actually need help. "They're willing to sit here for 4 minutes listening to prompts and hitting buttons, they must need help" because as we all know, in most cases it doesn't matter which sequence of numbers you press, the same person is going to answer the phone, or same group of people.
replyI would love to see an app/overlay that displays what each option is during the call. Some system where you don’t have to listen to the whole list of “press x for y”.
replyI have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.
Android does this fairly well for me - it will list out the options as they are spoken, and you can click on them directly to type the number. I believe (but haven't seen this recently) it will pre-render the options before they are read if it has knowledge of that phone tree.
replyBut watch out, as our menu options have recently changed!
replyGood point, but seriously why are the menu options so frequently changing?? (or is that just more BS to delay you further)
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