Dial ‘O’ To Speak to a Human…

About a month ago, I had to contact Time Warner Cable to discuss a problem that I was having with my Internet connection not working. Since I work from home, it was kind of a big deal, so I was hoping to speak to someone right away to help resolve the issue. However, like most other companies nowadays, when I dialed the customer service number, I didn’t get a human voice. Instead, I got one of those automated prompts. Several prompts later, I finally spoke to a human being who only wound up setting me up for the obstacle course of being transferred to approximately seven different humans before I finally landed on one who was able to resolve my Internet connectivity problem (around 2.5 hours later)

If You’d Like to Make a Call, Please Hang Up & Try Again…

I knew that the issue I was having with my Internet was not one that would be able to be handled by an automated response. I needed to speak to a human…a living human; and my frustration over this fairly new wave of automated response systems is not felt by me alone. In fact, there are many people who, while sitting through various automated response systems, actually become increasingly frustrated and upset. Now, whenever I need to contact the customer service department of any company, I simply keep hitting ’0′ as soon as I hear the first automated prompt come up. Sure, I may still get transferred a dozen times before I speak to someone who can help me, but is there really any other alternative?

GetHuman.com

The geniuses behind gethuman.com have come up with a fairly extensive list of popular companies as well as their customer service phone numbers and how you can reach a human being in that particular business without having to sit through the myriad of automated prompts. The site offers contact information for each of the companies (i.e. customer service phone numbers to dial) as well as the average wait time that you can be expected to experience. In most cases, the site also offers links to that particular company’s Twitter page or support page as well as recent user reviews. To see the complete list, visit their site. In the meantime, the following is one example from their site:

• DirecTV- Say “Technical Support” or “CRG” if you want to cancel services. If you want to make programming changes, say, “ACE”. The robot woman will then say, “One moment while I transfer you” instead of asking you a billion questions.