I hate almost all automated phone systems (except of course the ones created by Gold Systems.) Most suck and even though a little bit of effort could radically improve them, companies (and their customer service groups) don’t seem to understand (or care) about how their customers interact with them.
While I try to avoid picking up the phone and asking for help, it happens sometimes. I try to get a special magic phone number that reaches a human immediately (e.g. I fly United a lot and can get a person on one ring), but this is the rare exception not the norm.
Jason pointed me to the Dial A Human web site. This is a great site that lists the real phone numbers for customer support for a bunch of companies along with instructions to hack the phone system to bypass the menu prompts and get to a human right away.
I tried it on a few – it worked pretty well (I found one error and corrected it.) Obviously a wiki format would be great for this, but at least there is this.
Posted in: Great StuffCOMMENTS (2)
Brad,
You might also like GetHuman. It's a leading site that has a lot of numbers (has always worked for me).
you know the special dial-a-human sites are valuable because companies view them much like they view deal sites that leak purloined black friday sale offers.
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