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Fonolo Lets You Bypass Company Phone Menus
An anonymous reader writes "Fonolo, a Toronto based voice 2.0 company, helps you avoid those annoying company phone menus by letting you skip ahead in the company phone system using a process they call 'deep-dialing.' Just search for the company on their website (apparently they have over 500), and you'll see a visual representation of the company's phone system. Then you just select the option you want, put your phone number in, and Fonolo calls the company on your behalf and dials you back when the agent is available — for free. They have a business product that provides this same service (visual dialing), plus virtual queuing and data pass-through." One company creates a phone system designed to encourage you to hang up to save them money. Another creates a phone system designed to make it easy to stay on hold indefinitely. I wonder where this ends.
I think it's called Comcast 4u or something like that. If there's a large que of calls you get the option to have the company call you back when it's your turn. I can't imagine why more companies don't do this.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
"Please listen to the menu options as they have recently changed."
Yeah, right! When was the last time you recently changed them? Oh, listen, I haven't called company X in over a year, but their menu system has not recently changed, it's been the same for so many years!
I called shaw.ca about my business account. After waiting for over 20 minutes a call center drone answered. Gave all my info then he asked for my business PIN. Huh? So he said he'd mail it to me and it would arrive within 5 minutes. "Can you wait for me to get it?" "NO, so, sorry, we're not allowed to wait." "So I have to wait 5 minutes then wait another 20 on hold at Shaw?"
I guess he didn't like that because the PIN never did arrive. Fuckers, I HATE SHAW.
Trolling is a art,
But they don't. I've not once been sent to somebody who can't help me by dialling "0" repeatedly or repeating "operator" to the voice recognition system. Not to mention, it's infinitely frustrating when they make me waste a half hour dialling in identifying numbers, my address, etc., only for the CSR to ask for the exact same information the second they pick up the phone.
No comment.
What the hell is a "voice 2.0 company"? Do I need to pay some type of a voice maintenance package to upgrade to voice 2.0? Where there any point releases to patch my voice 1.0 company that fixed bugs or maybe had some trivial new feature?
With 135 years between releases 1.0 and 2.0, they probably should speed up the release cycle some. Hopefully they don't pull a Mozilla and come out with voice 3.0 in three months and immediately EOL voice 2.0.
Phone the sales department. You'll find that they have a very short waiting time, often instant. Get them to transfer you.
In the UK, try http://www.saynoto0870.com/ and put in the support number, or company name. Often you can get local call numbers for premium rate lines, or direct office numbers bypassing the switchboard.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Asterisk Reverse Hold! You call them up and then put them on hold through your Asterisk system. It parks the call and plays a loop telling them not to hang up and to dial a number when you come off hold. Then it makes your phone ring and connects the call. Genius! And if they want to leave you on hold for a month, that's fine. At least as long as you come in through their 800 number...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have a colleague who puts these calls on loudspeaker. He happily keys in his credit card number, bank account number, DoB and all the rest. I've even heard him spell out his address to the operator.
Should I warn him or just kept recording?
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Hi there, CEO of Fonolo here.
Our consumer service is offered completely for free.
We make money from our enterprise product which you can read about at http://fonolo.com/
Why do we offer the free service?
1) It promotes what we're doing (especially when we get slashdotted!)
2) It showcases our technology (the engine that runs the consumer service is also at the heart of the enterprise product)
3) It lets us try new features and learn about the best way to improve the call center experience.
4) We wanted it for ourselves!
- Shai
I've been using lucyphone.com to do this for a couple years, now.
I also find it frustrating that I take the time to enter my account number and am asked for it again by a real person. I always ask at this point why I was asked to enter it in the first place, or if they don't already have that information forwarded to them on their screen. I think they sometimes just ask us to be annoying. Maybe not. Maybe the company has a communication system that only does part of its job.
Entering this data is so that your call can be placed properly in the queue. Some customers have priority status and when they enter their number, they go to the front of the queue or even to a "high value customer CSR". The information is typically not passed to the CSR's system when the call is finally dispatched.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I have discovered a remarkably effective solution to annoying phone menus.
I can type up a reasonably professional looking letter in about 5-8 minutes. 10 if it's a complicated issue. It takes me another 3-4 minutes to walk to the letterbox and 3-4 minutes to walk back.
While I am doing this, I do not have to sit listening to Greensleeves played by a six year old with a stylophone.
IOW, I can get a letter written, printed, stamped and posted in less time than I'm likely to spend on hold with many of these organisations with complicated phone systems. And with considerably fewer grey hairs.
It's unusual to have to deal with something so urgently that it can't wait a few days, and most companies will put a reasonably smart team on to answering letters - frequently people with more pull, certainly people who are more likely to give you an intelligent answer or route your letter to someone who can. Email doesn't seem to have the same effect.
I can't quite believe I'm saying this in these days where we can send enormous quantities of information to the other side of the world in a matter of seconds, but letter writing is the way forward.
As I see it there are two types of IVR systems. Those systems that efficiently route you to a person or an automated task, and there are those systems that hide the CSRs way at the back and force you to wade through endless lists of "is this your issue?" menu options, with the hopes that somewhere buried within there will be an automated answer so they don't have to pay a CSR to handle your call. I hate the later, and I doubt I'm alone.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Sears is between incompetence and evil. We bought an air conditioner from a Sears store. I bought it a little late in the season and used it for one season. The following season I went to hook it up a few weeks earlier. It's good I did, because it failed to work. I'd actually taken the unit out of the window and stored it inside for the winter, so it had been ideally protected.
Sears sent a tech out a few days later without any parts. After decomposing the unit he decided the fault was in the control board. We had to wait for the parts to be shipped to our address and then schedule a tech revisit. Meanwhile we went through several days of temperatures over 100 degrees. Sears sent the wrong part. Then they sent another board, the right one, which didn't fix the problem with another tech visit.
All this had gone on so long that we were now past the warranty period of one year, but of course I had called them within the month. So we called back on the advice of the technician to get the unit replaced because he had failed to achieve anything, and they told us they couldn't help us because it had been longer than a year and our information had been purged from their system. As you can imagine this was not what we wanted to hear. My lady then spent three hours on the phone yelling at various people before we could get a replacement lined up.
Naturally Sears had "discontinued" our model, and although they had an identical model with a new model number they "couldn't" manage to get it into the store. As a result, we ended up with yet another unit. In order to get it we had to take the old unit to the store, pick out the new unit, go home, and come back in 24 hours after the swap was approved. The only unit they had in the store was a substantially different shape, so I had to make a new window block for the remainder, and it is also significantly less efficient. Not only does it say it draws more power, but our bill went up noticeably.
On top of that, this unit made a horrible squeaking noise when it ran. As it turned out, it is a miserable piece of shit. Its innards consist mostly of three pieces of styrofoam which are free to rub against each other and squeak like mexican takeout coming home on a bumpy road. Two of them are taped together, but so sloppy that they squeak anyway. I decased the unit and put them together with wood glue, then added more foam tape where the styrofoam was rubbing the case enclosure, and now it sounds normal.
My last run-in with Sears was over a primer bulb for a weedwhacker. I went in to the parts depot and asked about it and was told that it would be over twenty dollars for the part, plus shipping. Though Sears has their own interstate trucking network, they wanted me to overpay for USPS to ship a sub-one-ounce part. I ended up at a place called Powered Outdoor Equipment which sold me the original (branded) Walbro part for five bucks, in stock.
Fuck Sears and all they stand for.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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From the summary:
One company creates a phone system designed to encourage you to hang up to save them money. Another creates a phone system designed to make it easy to stay on hold indefinitely. I wonder where this ends.
Well, I suppose it ends with a company that creates a computer system that actually does the talking for you. Both ends of the conversation hire the company and then ... Skynet?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.