Just Say Goo

You know the drill. You dial a number (bank, credit card company, doctors office) and the first thing you hear is the voice of the robot announcing "to listen to your options press 1". Companies and organizations, both large and small, want to route less and less calls to their customer service departments. They deliberately set up the phone systems to keep each caller, the customer, in a 15 minute loop of number pressing until you are able to speak to a human being.

They usually ask you to key in your account number, so have it ready, and even though you followed the directions and keyed it in, when/if you actually speak to a customer service rep the customer service rep will ask for it again? So why bother asking you for it before you reach a customer service rep? Why waste everyone's time?

Because they don't want you to wait. They want you to hang up and go away. They figure if you are away from home making this call you wont have your account number and hang up. Many times you cannot proceed with your call without the account number. They want to waste your time so it looks like it didn't take them a long time to get to you. It was YOUR fault.

No one likes these automated systems. Half, actually more than half, of the times you call, the issue you are calling about doesn't have a prompt so you don't know which button to push anyway! Then if you go to the wrong department and they have to transfer you, you will most likely get "magically" disconnected and you can start this whole annoying, time-wasting, getting-ready-to-load-your-gun-and-go-postal process all OVER AGAIN.

THIS IS CUSTOMER SERVICE? What customer appreciates this? Doesn't everyone, the second they call and discover this automated "barrier" between themselves and a human being, want to take the phone and throw it in a lake? Exactly. That is their point. They want you to hang up.

Don't get me started on the "press or say ___" bullshit either, because you either must repeat yourself 14 ZILLION times before the automated system understands you, or you have to scream so loud that you would drown out Ty Pennington and his megaphone. Hell, you would have to scream louder than an AC/DC concert. I cannot believe how LOUD I have had to scream to get them to understand me, and I am in a house with little or no background noise. Many people have to call from work, or when they are out running errands, places where screaming your account number is not a really great idea. With identity theft being a rising crime, it is also a stupid option. Pretty soon every f'n company will have one of these customer service/tech support automated systems, and we will all be at their mercy.

Do these systems make YOU feel like you are getting customer support or customer pissed off? Tech support or tech infuriated? The words "service" and "support" should in no way be used to describe these bullshit systems. Can they get any worse?