My company is considering an automated answering menu on our main line. I'm curious of what the limit of tolerance is people have for these phone menus.

That made talking to the 8-year old kid who was asked to call by his Spanish-speaking parents even more aggrivating.

It works well, the boss took the entire company & Wives/husbands on a 3 day trip to the Bahamas last year to show his appreciation.

(Nah, I didn't really have anything I wanted to talk about today...I just have some leftover cell phone minutes and I find pushing buttons to be a stimulating leisure activity. Kudos to the system for realizing I didn't have any actual business to transact and putting a stop to my playtime foolishness!)

Nickle and dimed? I say 'dollared and screwed'

"Go to the collections department."

I used to work in a collections call center for a mid-sized cell phone company. Any time someone called our dept, we were supposed to take care of the collections issue first (if there were any) and then we had to transfer them to customer service. This was so we could spend all of our time getting money for the company. If someone got mad that they waited to talk to us and then now had to wait in queue for someone in customer service, we were supposed to lie to them and tell them that we were going to transfer them so they by-passed the queue and would get the very next CSR. I didn't work for them for very long.

Some voice recognition systems can recognize mumbling as mumbling.

I used to request "Half-Trained Disgruntled Phone Monkey" - the voice systems can tell you're speaking clearly, but still has no idea what you want. Usually a human being followed in short order.

SOME systems will lock out the voice if it doesn't recognize what you're saying after a certain number of attempts - then you're stuck with keypad hell again.

I'll second that on calling them collect. Call them collect on the international line and you will get in almost immediately.

Now who here wants a cheese sandwich?

sometimes it works. even when it doesn't, it's a good venting method. ;)

most credit cards have the collect number at on the back of the card.

BTW this was a previous consumerist post from a while back in which I'm referring to.

I've gone the cussing route too but it doesn't seem to work very consistently. Are the systems geared for certain words or for an increase in volume?

@jamesdenver:
That does not work all the time. When I was at Comcast there were many times when we were not busy, I mean just sitting there and the Spanish speaking people had close to 20 calls on hold. Also in some companys because of the need for Spanish people to be available to assist Spanish speaking customers, they will transfer you back into the que if you are able to speak english. Not always right but the way it is done sometimes

If zero doesn't work, I just start punching keys at random and rapidly. The phone system normally assumes you're too stupid to know how to use a phone and routes you to a person.

Another way is to keep hitting all the "other" options. The reject state for "other" is always eventually to dump you on a human.

Yet another way is to not do anything. Eventually the system will decide that there's something wrong with you that you can't work with the system and dump you to a human.

An aside: I've noticed som voice systems will implicitly accept numbers even if they don't actually say they do. When they give you a list of things you can say, the first can be accessed via 1, etc.

PS: I hate voice-only systems, with a passion. They really suck when you are not in a private place (like the office, etc.) My coworkers don't need to hear me yammering "YES, YES, CUSTOMER SUPPORT, NEW ISSUE, YES," etc. Or, say, my CC number.

Talk about annoying and inefficient.

I actually use the Spanish prompt quite often. It really does get you through faster.

All Spanish operators I've dealt with speak English - so I just apologize I for hitting "dos" and we move on.

At least the computer voice is more polite then most CSRs.

What we use at work all the time.