Please Hold
“Thank you for calling customer service at Exquisite Complications. Please hold for an important message … [click] This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.” Breathing a sigh of relief, you now know that this will be a conversation with a person. Thank heavens for small mercies.
“Before continuing, would you please enter your ten-digit telephone number, followed by a hash key.” Done. Wait. “Thank you. Would you please press 1 is this is not your telephone number, or 2 if it is?” Tricky. 2. Wait. Now there is a short message in another language. If you are an experienced user of call answering systems in the US, you know this is a message in Spanish, so that Hispanic callers will be able to use their native language. The instruction is to push 2 if you wish to continue in Spanish. If you are an English speaker, do not press 2! If you do, and mess up any following instruction, your account will be cancelled, your call will be terminated, and the system will automatically block any and all future calls. It’s a path to the first circle of hell![i]
You didn’t press 2 and you waited. “Please enter your customer number, followed by a …”. I can’t believe you did that. You just entered your customer number followed by a hash key before the system completed the request!! Yes, sure enough, after some silence “Please enter your customer number, followed by the hash key.” Off you go. Wait. The request repeats for a third time: “Please enter your customer number followed by the hash key. If you do not know your customer number, you will find it on the top right-hand corner of your recent bill.” Off you go once more. Wait. “Please enter your zip code.” You wait, just in case. Oh no, you waited too long. “Please enter your zip code.” Enter. Do you add a hash? You do. “Please enter your zip code”. Right. Enter without ending with the hash key. Keep calm and carry on!
“Please enter your date of birth.” Tricky. No advice, so is it 2-digit month, two-digit day, and a two-digit or a four-digit year? Let’s try 2, 2, 4. It worked. You feel good, as the next request begins. “Please enter your Social Security number.” Find that, enter the required 9-digit number. Wait. “Please enter your … car’s VIN number, your Adjusted Gross Income for 2017, your bank account number and secret password, the price of a gallon of petrol at the nearest BP service station today, the result of multiplying 27, 493 and 2002 together …” Just joking! Well, not really, because you can be sure a telephone number, zip code and SSN will not be enough. You can fill in other likely requests from your own experience. The system needs to track you.
Wait. “Please listen to the following choices carefully. They have recently been changed. 1 – queries about your current account. 2 – make a payment. 3 – change your personal details. 4 – request a service call. 5 – report a service failure. You can return to this menu at any time by pressing the star key.” Press 3. Wait. “Please listen to the following choices carefully. They have recently been changed. 1 – change your telephone number. 2 – change your banking details. 3 – change your address.”
You have reached the point where a skilled user of telephone answering systems knows how to game the system. Press 1, and before anything else happens, press the hash key. If you are lucky, the next response will be “Sorry. The number you entered was incomplete. Please try again.” Repeat the hash key. Might have to do that twice more. Eventually, the system responds: “It seems we are having difficulty understanding your response. Please stay on the line, while we transfer you to a customer service representative.” Yay. [click] “Thank you for calling customer service at Exquisite Complications. Please hold for an important message … [click] This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.” There are two possibilities at this point. You may be on hold for a customer service representative (65% probability), or you may have defaulted back to the beginning (30% probability). You will notice there is a 5% probability remaining: that covers the unlikely (but scary and real) possibility that you have been cast out into on-hold purgatory, never to get back into the system. Wait.
There might be time to take a break here for some interesting information. Experienced users have reported you can get to a live customer service representative by swearing! [ii] Look, I took this one on trust, and I haven’t tested it. I didn’t because of the NSA, because they listen to every call. I might also have been a little worried that the website reporting this brilliant time saver is called ‘Hello Giggles’. If anyone does try this approach, please let me know the result!!
Where were we? I remember, being transferred to a customer service representative. [click] “Please enter your customer number followed by the hash key. If you do not know your customer number, you will find it on the top right-hand corner of your recent bill.” That sounds familiar, but better do it. Wait. “Please enter your zip code.” Really, doesn’t this system remember anything? Enter. Do you add a hash? You do. “Please enter your zip code”. Sigh. Right. Enter without ending with the hash key. “Please enter your date of birth.” From before we know it is a two-digit month, two-digit day, and a four-digit year. Wait. “Please enter your Social Security number.” Find that, enter the required 9-digit number. Wait.
[click] “Please hold for the next available customer service representative.” Now the music starts. Did I say music? Well, I suppose that’s a matter of definition. Bitter aural experience has made you aware there are three likely possibilities: the same piece of music, instrumental or a song, on repeat, forever; the same three pieces of music or songs, on repeat, forever; a sequence of gentle mood music items, on repeat for a longer period, which becomes just as annoying as the first two options after 20 minutes or so. I have read some systems now allow you to choose: one choice is silence, but that leads to the fear you have dropped into the second circle of hell, a void from which no representative ever returns. Alternatively, some ( a very few) allow you to choose your own music! [iii] Better be quick, though, or you might be dropped by the system!
As you wait for that elusive person, there are two repeating messages, both every 2 minutes. The first: “If you go to www.onlineresourceswitheverythingneededbysmartpeople.com you will find our full range of services, and a comprehensive collection of frequently asked questions.” You had already tried that and couldn’t find what you wanted, which is why you are listening to this advice. I guess that means either you’re not smart, or the website isn’t as good as they promised.
The second interruption to the music as you wait is the annoying update. “Thank you for waiting. You have advanced in the queue. There are 273 people in front of you. The expected wait time is 88 minutes. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line, or alternatively go to our website at …” Since you failed with the website, and at this point you’ve already been on hold for 20 minutes, you might as well keep on the call.
We should take a detour at this point (after all, we have over an hour to wait) and return to Nigel Clarke. He was the man who considered call centre menu options as the “modern equivalent of Dante’s circles of hell”. [iv] He has done more than that. Fed up with wasting time listening to endless recorded options, Mr. Clarke catalogued the intricate phone menus of hundreds of companies and posted the results to his website, where he lists shortcuts, which comprise the correct sequence of numbers to dial to have your call immediately transferred to the person or department you were seeking.
His task led him to focus on the phone menus of 130 leading companies, where he found several had as many as 80 options available, if not more. The worst offender in the UK was HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, otherwise known as the income tax people!), where merely navigating the options can take up to six minutes to reach the correct department, before you start waiting for a person to answer. HMRC “receives 79 million calls per year – equivalent to a potential 4.3 million hours just navigating menus. Others include Direct Line Insurance’s business customer service, with 107 options over three menu levels, and Argos store enquiries, with 73 options over five levels.” If you want to find out more about Nigel Clarke’s sterling work (!!), please visit his website, ‘www.pleasepress1.com’. [v] Great work: go, Nigel! He looked at the UK: I wonder which company is the worst in the US? In Australia?
Oops, while we’ve been reading about Nigel, a person has answered the telephone. “Good afternoon. My name is Jacinda [just joking]. And who [sic] am I talking to?” You answer. “How may I help you today.” You begin to explain. “Before we start, can I just ask you a few questions.” Can you guess what they are? Yes, your customer number, your zip code, your date of birth, your Social Security number. On top of those rather familiar requests, two more: your email address and your telephone number, all to be fed into a data analytics system.
At long last, we have emerged into the sunshine of human communication. You explain your issues, which it turns out cannot be solved. As the call comes to an end, you find you are being redirected. [click] “Please help us improve our service by answering the following five short questions. Please answer each question using a 1 – 5 scale, where 1 means unsatisfactory, 2 means just a little unsatisfactory, 3 means good, 4 means very good, and 5 means excellent”.
Take a deep breath. “Question 1. How effective was our customer service representative in addressing your issue? Please rate your answer using the 1-5 scale where 1 is unsatisfactory and 5 is excellent. If you are unable to remember the steps in the scale, please press the star key. Once you have heard the scale explained, you will be returned to the question.” You only stayed on the call to give them feedback, so let’s do it. You press 1.
“Did you just press 1? Do you realise that you are threatening the employment of one of the people who work at Exquisite Complications? Do you want that on your conscience? Question 1. How effective was our customer service representative in addressing your issue? Please rate your answer using the 1-5 scale where 1 is extremely unsatisfactory and 5 is excellent. If you are unable to remember the steps in the scale, please press the star key. Once you have heard the scale explained, you will be returned to the question.” Here’s the test: do you have the fortitude to keep going, entering low scores for all five questions? You could ring off. However, I should warn you determined systems will purse you. You may receive a machine call (a robocall), asking you to give feedback on your recent service call. You may be pursued on email. If you do offer feedback, you may be invited to post your comments on the company website. Careful checking (alright, a little bit of checking) reveals low scores hardly ever appear on company websites. There is a better range of feedback on other sites, like Yelp, but you have to wonder how much ‘curating’ takes place even there? Did you just press 5? Chicken!
All this must read as funny, yet in real life, as you know, it is often very frustrating. Funny and frustrating? As Nigel explains, a Lloyds savings bank home insurance customer needing to report a water leak has to wade through 78 menu options over seven levels to get to the correct person. Great situation for John Cleese to exploit. But as one call industry website explained:
When people finally reach the menu the next problem they can run into is a series of options that don’t fit their situation. This forces users of your menu system to select an option that doesn’t apply to their problem to hopefully eventually reach an individual who can direct them where they need to go. If someone wants to call about finding a shoelace in their bag of rice and the manufacturer’s options are Order Status, Place an Order, and Request a Sample, then they’re just going to have to choose one of those. Even though they know it’s not right. Users also choose the wrong option when their terminology does not match the menu. When you’re calling Dell about a laptop problem and you don’t hear the term “laptop”, you might end up selecting the option for all other devices instead of realizing that Dell calls these devices “notebooks”.[vi]
This hints at something to concern us. These systems are defining our world. It is easy to make rude comments about automated telephone systems, moaning to friends and worrying about increased blood pressure as waiting time goes by. That misses a key point. We are being ‘shaped’, nudged into behaviours and types of interaction the system defines, while dissuaded from others (like complaining about a product). The call answering system is training us. Even a nice customer service representative may be unable to help past a certain point. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you on that,” a response often followed by, “On this issue, you will have to write to the Manager, Service.” Surprise! His or her name and telephone number cannot be provided, and every complaint you make is registered against your mobile number and your email address, helping the system identify you as a possible trouble maker – for the rest of time!
“Thank you for calling customer service. Please understand this service is limited to those things we are willing and able to do. Questions that cannot be answered may be referred to our website [which we know is similarly limited] which may help you find the answer you are seeking. Customer service calls may be monitored. Our representatives have been authorised to disconnect those customers who demonstrate aggressive or inappropriate behaviour over the telephone. Oh, did we forget to mention that your call is important to us?”
[i] I stole that idea from the UK’s Nigel Clarke: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325639/How-beat-automated-phone-maze-One-man-written-shortcuts-straight-actual-person-want.html. We’ll return to him later.
[ii] https://hellogiggles.com/lifestyle/get-past-automated-phone-systems-real-person/
[iii] https://www.akendi.com/blog/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-automated-phone-systems/
[iv] Op cit
[v] http://www.pleasepress1.com/uk/
[vi] Op cit: https://www.akendi.com/blog/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-automated-phone-systems/
