Paul English has one of the most useful pages I’ve ever seen:
http://www.paulenglish.com/ivr/
Once upon a time, I thought IVR (Interactive Voice Response) was a really neat technology. I remember when airlines first got it and me and my brother would call all the time to find out the information for various flights.
Now, I just long for the days of being able to talk to a real human.
Every now and then, I think an IVR system is great (if it’s got short menus, good navigation, and good voice recognition), but most of them are pretty bad, and it’s hard to get useful information in a timely manner. Worse yet are the times that you actually need real information and not canned responses…
Paul’s page is great for two reasons:
- It lists some hard to find customer service numbers (Amazon’s, for example)
- Once you’ve called, it tells you the secret of how to talk to real people.
Invaluable.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:09 am under Useful Info :
How amusing. On the first day that I actually wanted to use this, he migrated the system over to a new website with some more features.
gethuman.com is the actual site and gethuman.com/us/ is the old cheat sheet. But there’s some other stuff there like a tip sheet on how to get through a generic IVR and a campaign to list the best/worst companies (with respect to phone support).
On a side note, ironically (yes, I know I’m using the word somewhat incorrectly), my company OHO has made our phone system more impenetrable. Some of our clients who are used to being able to talk to me have had trouble getting through (though that’s mostly been sorted out now). That’s been frustrating for me too since I actually (usually) like talking to (most of) our clients. Oh well.
February 2nd, 2006 | Permalink