Why can you never speak to a person anymore? I hate automated phone services!!?

Question

really raises the blood pressure.

Answer 1

tell me about it , my electric comany are idiots

at least an automated voice is not rude and does not tell barefaced  lies

Answer 2

I hate them too, but you have to give them their credit and note that after listening to the whole of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in tinkle mode you can usually speak to a real person by waiting for option 5.  Let me also give a thumbs up here for Essex Council in the UK, they've ditched the Vivaldi, and guess what you listen to while you're waiting, 'Baby Please Don't Go'............wheee, lol.

Answer 3

I completely agree with you! You get a list of options as long as your arm, but never the option to speak to a human being!

Answer 4

I reckon we all hate them.  Why is the phone answered when no-one is available?

We pay from the second the call is 'answered' to the time we ring off.  Infuriating to pay to spend 20 minutes on 'hold'.

The music drives me mad too.  I would rather hear the ring tone - that is free.

Answer 5

Oh,how I agree with you.The "options" never cover what you want to discuss,anyway.

Have you tried shouting that you want an agent?

Answer 6

tell me about it " your call is important to us..." Rubbish

Answer 7

when you finally do speak to a person, they are in india or krapistan and you can only understand 1 out of 3 words they say and they don't know what the fck they are talking about.

Answer 8

My favourite so far is BT

Went through dozens of menu options, put my phone number in and eventually got to a call centre in India. They could not help - even though I had selected the correct options and passed me over to customer service in Britain. Who sorted the problem in minutes

Would have been so much easlier to simply bypass all the call centre nonsense

Answer 9

press 3 for a human lol , i wish . payroll cutbacks, you don't have to pay a tape recorder benefits or else your talking to somebody from india who speaks very little english. anything to save some money

Answer 10

I do too.  And I really hate it when they don't repeat the menu, or when they don't let you go back to the previous menu.  Or when you have to press a million buttons just to ask a simple question.  Or, when you've pressed lots of buttons, but you still get some automated recording at the end that tells you to call another phone number.    :P

Sometimes if you don't press any numbers, they'll allow you to go right through because the system will think you are on a rotary phone.  I'm not sure if that happens much anymore (it used to be more common) but hey, it is worth a shot.  Sometimes I just press "0" or "#" or something like that close to the beginning to get an operator.  Sometimes it works.

Answer 11

I always hang up and write to the company because not only does that annoy them as they have to send a written response but then I have evidence of communication which can come in very useful.

Answer 12

Please press 1 for sales 2 for accounts and 3 to hear these options again.

Answer 13

You don't have to pay machines wages.