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Get Out of Voice Menu Pergatory
renx99 writes "I don't know about you, but I hate calling tech support, and the worst if the wait. Paul English felt the same way and has put together a list of shortcuts on how to get to a human quickly. If enough people bypass these phone systems, maybe the big companies will finally get a clue and start providing real customer service again..."
NPR's Morning Edition did a story on this guy yesterday (listen linky). They had a few on air examples of this, then also had some interns do some more tests. They said average time to get an operator was something like 56 seconds from the time they dialed. Good stuff to know...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I work for a major wireless company for their customer support. All calls go thru the IVR system first, which then attempts to verify their account and then route to the appropriate specialist queues based on the general category of the problem.
It's quicker than asking for a rep, waiting on hold for a customer service rep who will perform the same process manually and shuffle you off to the appropriate specialist. Cuts down on both your hold time, the hold time of folks just needing regular customer service, and allows the company to serve you better.
I had this problem when I was trying to get in contact with IBM to get support on Tivoli SAN Software.
Even though I am Icelandic I speak very good english like most other people in my county (we are tought it from the age of 9.)
But of course I have a slight accent and I could never get out of the first menu. Who in hell thought that this could be in any way more reliable or easy than simply having a touch button menu. I really can understand why they would have some form of computer service to answer and do basic organizing of calls but it can not result on us not getting any service at all.
Pergatory?
Saying "representative" or "agent" will almost always work. I'm a relay operator, so I'm on the phone *ALL* day with 800 numbers...
LegendMUD
well, technically speaking you have an accent as well. I could probably notice it on you (unless you're western Canadian).
The systems are set up though to only deal with the broadcast standard accent, which I think is the problem.
Pergatory? There's another obviously horrid mistake in the blurb, which was supposedly edited by a human. [Did the editing get outsourced or something? No can't be india... I guess none of it is actually done.]
And that is one reason I am starting to dislike "customer service". You get lots of utterly ignorant people, and the ones that can't read or write are often the ones that can't understand the spoken word. "I can't help you right now, I will have to ask my supervisor to look at your situation and call you back in the morning" Conversation should be OVER, save a few niceties. Quit arguing with me, it's just killing my stats. I can't help you, bitch/fuckwit.
So I just imagine the pain of those in their organizational silos, getting people that insisted on talking to the wrong person. It's their job performance that suffers- all the stats for incoming and outgoing calls are recorded. The more out calls, and the longer the calls, the more likely you are to get canned. Plus, I get to have a person on hold while I'm on hold with another department. WTF? Misery insists on having company to listen to elevator music.
If you're pissed off about a phone menu, don't make the reps suffer. Tell them politely, or better yet, write a letter about it. Take your business elsewhere if you hear of better service.
But for the love of #random deity# just press the buttons and be nice to the rep.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
In the UK, at least, the voicemail systems don't assume you have a tonedial phone (there are still plenty of pulse dialers around). So they always start by asking you to press # or something. If you don't press anything, most of them will drop you straight through to a voice operator.
I work in the call center business and some things I'd like to point out.
:)
1 - When an IVR tells you to speak your choices but doesn't say you can also punch them in, most of the times you actually can punch those in. In fact, on some IVRs what happens is that a speech block is matched and then translated into a keystroke and the program proceeds.
2 - IVR programming is mega bucks. People spend millions of dollars, analyzing call center efficiency, developing IVR applications, developing CTI routing strategies and developing desktop applications (in_house/standard CRM packages and so on and CTI enabled desktop apps).
Most IVR apps that we encounter are seemingly 2-3 level deeps menus with a good 5-6 options that we can hear. In reality, some of these applications contains thousands of IVR pages, a page being a menu choice of a voice playback that you hear. Some of these IVR applications take months to develop and months to test. It is normal for a customer to initiate a project in January and be going live with an IVR application in December. It's a lot of work.
3 - Speech recognition mostly happens today using Nuance, BBN, and Speechworks products. IBM and MS speech recognitions engines are not used for such applications. A lot of times the choice is limited depending on what IVR platform is used. Many times there are corporate standards or partnerships or loyalty to one platform and it forces all newly acquired and other owned entities to switch to the same platform. This also causes millions of dollars worth of business to call center service providers.
4 - Some business people who decide on the menu items and the layout for the IVR, actually allow barge-thru (speak while IVR is speaking or press a number). These people also allow you to zero out and hit the operator. They will even allow customers to say operator or agent anywhere and be thrown out of the IVR and into the agent queue immediately. Sometimes, they will try to convince you to pick a choice but if you insist on pressing 0 they will connect you thru.
People on the other end of the spectrum will force you to listen to everything and anything they can imagine. They will not allow zero'ing out. These people don't mind dropping the call if the customer doesn't get with the program.
There's people in the middle of this spectrum also.
Sometimes, federal/state/local law requires that certains anouncements must be played or certain conversations must be recorded or blah blah. Sometimes, it is applicable to one kind of business and not all. So it gets complicated.
Some IVRs as part of the OS, will just crash out and route you to a default queue if you keep pressing 0 like there's no tomorrow. But you may end up at the wrong queue and be put back in the correct queue.
The automated message has me enter in my account number before having me directed to the correct operator. At that point the guy (or girl) at the other end asks me for my account number. It drives me nuts....Why implement such a system?
The phone system might have been set up for software that doesn't exist anymore or is not used in all locations. I worked for a company where this happened. The phone system asked you for the phone number on the account and then I asked them for the same thing. When the company decides to outsource support, sometimes the systems they have set up to automatically transfer that info to the answering agent does not work. They also sometimes change accounting software and break compatability. Many times the bureaucracy of the company keeps the loose ends from being tied up. So the system continues to ask for account info when nobody uses it because they don't want to hassle with changing the phone system.
Also, some automated systems will tell the customer if they are in an outage or not if they recognise the customer as being in an effected area from their account information. This cuts down on reps getting 50 phone calls where all they say is "you're in an outage, we're working on it".