Life Pro Tips

This is entirely dependent on the phone system and this will not work a lot of the time.

Phone systems I have managed or installed will never work with this.

So, I work in the call center industry, and sometimes this is true. I've spoken to hundreds of companies over the years about how they do their IVR (the thing you hear before talking to a person).

• If the IVR is speech enabled and asks an open ended question like "how can I help you", there's likely an option to say agent/representative/supervisor

• If you get a list of options, there's likely a hidden option to reach an agent, but what you press will vary by company (typically 9, 0, or *) and there's no guarantee you'll get there any faster. It might actually be slower, because you are likely to be put into a "catch all" group and might even be more likely to require getting transferred.

• Random tip, but # is commonly used as a terminator when typing digits. So if you're typing your date of birth, CC info, or whatever, press # and you won't have to wait the extra few seconds for it to "decide" if you're done. I also press it if I fat finger some digits and need to start over quicker.

The system we deploy (Amazon Connect) is used by the likes of Intuit, Delta Airlines, Capital One, etc. though my company didn't deploy any of those in particular.

I just curse out the machine voice with all my pent-up frustration until it sends me to a real person and then it’s easier to be kind to the person who rescued me from robot hell.

Hitting 0 works a lot of the time still too. Like, fuck all this just let me talk to a person.

on Lemmy??

"Representative" works on some other systems

The company I used to work for you could say "agent" or press 0, but you had to do it many times because it would keep trying to make you play along. At the start of Covid in 2020, the call centers were totally overwhelmed, so someone decided to change that path to say "sorry, I don't know what you want, goodbye" and hang up.

Surprisingly, that change caused a marginal reduction in call volume, which was the goal. So, when the call centers stabilized later in the year, Finance balked at any suggestion that the decision be reversed unless someone came up with an idea to offset the cost of the increase in volume it would cause. It stayed like that for 2-3 years and was still very controversial when it was finally put back to the way it was before Covid.