You know the voice-activated, automated phone systems that are becoming popular? The ones i have in mind tell you the options and ask you to say your choice, rather than press a number corresponding to the choice. When you eventually speak your way through them to get to a Customer Service Representative (my inevitable destination), they always ask you to wait while they connect you (ie, drop you out of the automatic system and into a queue on a human's line).
After having spoken to the menu for the past five minues (often having to repeat myself with more enunciation), when they ask me to wait at that point, I always say, "Thank you." I will considered such systems to have finally evolved when they begin to respond with a "You're welcome."
1 comment:
I flipping hate these things.
The voice activated ones are a pain if you're in a noisy situation such as a cellphone with traffic or a mall with background music. They're triggered automatically by the first sound they hear, making them worthless unless you're in a quiet environment.
I just called Charter last night about my cable modem being down and it had an impressive interactive troubleshooter that asked me the type of modem I had and everything, though it was less impressive the second time I had to call after already trying it.
I kept hitting 0 and it would say "we really need you to power off the modem." 0... "A customer service agent would have you do this anyway." 0... "I understand you would like to speak to a customer service agent anyway, is that correct?" 0... Finaly I got to the hold queue for customer service and got to listen to the same song loop for half an hour.
The Week mentioned that some systems have "anger detection" that can tell if a user is getting frustrated and can redirect you to a human. I think I triggered one last night.
The worst is when you go through the whole system just to get a busy signal or disconnected.
Some blogs and news networks have published "automated voice shortcuts" to get you where you need to go. There's an interesting article here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002606799_voicemail06.html
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