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Agreed. People hate phone trees as well.

https://gethuman.com/

http://gethuman.com/ will often give you a decent number to get to an actual human in a lot of organizations.

Of course, gethuman.com works better if you have a functioning internet connection. Best to look up the critical numbers in advance and put them in your offline-accessible paper contact list.

http://gethuman.com/ will often give you a decent number to get to an actual human in a lot of organizations. Biased to the US at the moment. The person on the AT&T number has actually asked in puzzlement 'how did you get this number?'. I have no connection with the site, but have had the occasional success with it.

I'd like to point this wonderful website out...

http://gethuman.com/

Last time I had an issue with a major company (I think it was FedEx, it might've been UPS), their website failed horribly, I called their support line, tried several times to speak to anyone, and eventually got auto-disconnected after waiting on hold for a bit. In frustration, googled how to talk to a person there, ended up on that site. Immediately got an actual person, and a minute later, everything was fixed. It's a pretty awesome site.

You might try looking up the company at GetHuman. They've got a pretty good database of the arcane paths you need to follow through the IVR systems to get to a person.

The database at http://gethuman.com/ is an excellent resource for learning how to navigate these annoying automated phone systems used by most large companies.

http://gethuman.com/

FTW!

If it took you an hour to reach a person from Microsoft's support center, you were either doing something terribly wrong or you have awful luck. Last time I had to call Microsoft to activate XP (mid December of 2009) it took about 10 minutes to navigate the call menu and get a person, and another 5-10 minutes to actually get XP activated. I have never had a Microsoft technician tell me, "there is nothing we can do." I am not calling you a liar, but that sounds fishy to me.

See gethuman.com and type "microsoft" into the search thingie. It doesn't say anything about ~1 hour to get to a human.

argue my way up the manager food chain

What you fail to understand is that the customer-accessible part of the manager food chain in the vast majority of companies is approximately two people tall: CSR and supervisor. (Depending on the company and nature of question, you may be able to get to tier2 support; hence the "approximately".)

You will have better luck...

• Just calling back. Virgin Mobile's policies used to differ depending on which call center your call got routed to, but even in less extreme cases, some reps are nicer than others.
• Turboing. In particular, some companies have started to have "Executive Support" hotlines (Sprint comes to mind.) Save these for a last resort. GetHuman is also useful.
• Moving horizontally. Try web order support, activations, billing, customer service, terminations, etc.
• Being nice instead of nasty.
• Writing. Yes, seriously. I've resolved many issues just by sending the entity in question a nastygram. People still take snail-mail seriously.

Standardize the buttons.

There's always workarounds.

Try this: http://www.gethuman.com/gethuman_list.asp?bname=%22C%22

Lazy companies create "automated systems to handle most inquiries" ignoring the fact that even their claim states its own failing, it doesn't handle them all. So we have created a database of how to circumvent the barrier to customer support.

Now if only we could force them to hire customer support grunts without such thick accents.

Use gethuman.com and livehuman.com to find out how to get to a real human quickly at CC and other companies when calling them on the telephone.

If you can't call the number from the "Get Human" database at get human, AT&T usually gets you a human if you press 0 repeatedly, ignoring prompts.

Sometimes silence works. Try not saying or pressing anything.

Has anybody tried using a dialup botnet to DOS an 800-helpline yet? That would be an interesting comment on the lousy phone help we get from offshore.

If we wrote how we talked voice recognition might be helpful. We don't. Written communication is different and should be.

You're right of course. They're all the same. I use this strategy:

Lookup the real support number at gethuman.

Write down the bogus names they give you and say them often. Tell each operator who transferred you and ask who they're transferring you to (this is really frustrating for them because they know the names are bogus). Ask for a direct line phone number for every person you talk to.

Get a service ticket number.

The instant you're on hold, call from a different line and give the ticket number. Always use the same number.

Repeat for as many phone lines as you have available. Use cell phones too.

Most people surrender before they get service. Don't be one of them. This part can be really hard: always be courteous.

They get scored on calls per ticket and total time per ticket, so as soon as they realize you're burning three to six times the time as the usual victim, they're eager to really resolve your issue.

Using this system I can usually get them to RMA a flaky 512MB DIMM after only 4-7 working days of tech support, plus the usual shipping time.

by using cheatsheets like the one at http://gethuman.com/

I lump the voice and keypad menus in the same boat -- I just want to talk to a
person as quick as possible.

I use ivr systems all the time, I almost NEVER have them misunderstand me.

ennunciation at times helps.. pausing between #'s helps.

I know a lotta eastern europeans, they all scream bloody murder when they try...

you could always refer to http://gethuman.com/ if you just can't take it
The most popular part of the gethuman website is the gethuman database of secret phone numbers and codes to get to a human when calling a company for customer service. (See also our general tips.)

That page is pretty interesting. Especially the gethuman database

Bookmark this page. It will be your best friend.