Friday, March 24, 2006
A great way to get through automated phone trees - from personal experience
Today I had to call up five different credit card institutions and/or retailers to cancel credit cards I no longer was using. In every case, I got confronted by one of those obnoxious automated phone trees where you have to wade through level after level after level and they do everything in their power to BLOCK you from talking to a live customer service person. So after the first extremely annoying experience of keying in my account information and phone number and last four digits of my social security number, etc. and having to sit through menu after menu without hearing any options for talking to a live customer service person, I tried something that I wanted to pass along to others, as it got me through to a live person almost instantly in four out of five times that I tried it.
This is not a "copy and paste" of some SPAM email I received. This is something that I, tj, personally tried and it worked amazingly well so I thought you might like to know about it.
To get to a live person, just press "0" -- no matter WHAT the system response is. Typically when I did this initially I would get yet another automated response like "I'm sorry, we did not get the information you provided. Please input it again..." Then I pressed "0" again. Sometimes I had to do this up to five times but in 4 of the 5 calls I made to the various financial institutions, doing the "0" each time I got an automated phone prompt eventually got me to a live person. The longest it took me in any of these calls was about 45 seconds. It seems that if you keep responding to each automated phone tree prompt with "0", eventually the system gives up and concludes "I don't know what to do with this call" and dumps you over to a live person.
I can't guarantee this will work for you every time, but it sure worked often enough that I thought I would share this with others. Pass this along.
tj
This is not a "copy and paste" of some SPAM email I received. This is something that I, tj, personally tried and it worked amazingly well so I thought you might like to know about it.
To get to a live person, just press "0" -- no matter WHAT the system response is. Typically when I did this initially I would get yet another automated response like "I'm sorry, we did not get the information you provided. Please input it again..." Then I pressed "0" again. Sometimes I had to do this up to five times but in 4 of the 5 calls I made to the various financial institutions, doing the "0" each time I got an automated phone prompt eventually got me to a live person. The longest it took me in any of these calls was about 45 seconds. It seems that if you keep responding to each automated phone tree prompt with "0", eventually the system gives up and concludes "I don't know what to do with this call" and dumps you over to a live person.
I can't guarantee this will work for you every time, but it sure worked often enough that I thought I would share this with others. Pass this along.
tj
