Peter Jackson column
Dec 8 2005 By Peter Jackson, The Journal
Why do some businesses go out of their way to annoy their customers?
I asked myself this when, out Christmas shopping at the weekend, I had to flee one shop, hands clasped to ears, driven out by in-store music of particularly banal girl band variety.
That kind of thing is not the result of any policy on the part of the business but merely the policy of the teenage staff to whom that business has rashly delegated the choice of music.
The same cannot be said, however, for IVRs, or interactive voice response systems, or automated switchboards. It is through these systems which the enraged customer, telephoning with a query or request, must navigate in an increasingly frantic attempt to find a human being to talk to.
Everybody hates them - everybody, it seems, but the increasing number of companies introducing them.
When they first became popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s one could usually press "0" to immediately be connected to a human operator, but companies have increasingly removed that option.
Don't be fooled if they try to tell you this is in the interests of improved customer service. It is more likely to be in the interests of cost saving.
According to some estimates, an automated service can handle a customer query at one tenth the cost of a human agent.
You lose your customer, but you save a lot of money.
But now the customer can strike back, thanks to Paul English, a software engineer of Boston in the USA.
Mr English got as tired as the rest of us of IVRs but he decided to do something about it. He found various cheats which defeat the automated system and put the caller straight through to a human being. Now on his website - paulenglish.com - he lists cheats for the IVRs of more than 100 companies.
He also passes on a few generic ones which are likely to work. For instance: press 0 or 0£ or £0 or 0* or *0 repeatedly, sometimes quickly, ignoring any "invalid entry" messages.
Alternatively just hold on and fool the computer into thinking you only have the old rotary dial up phone. Sometimes just saying the word "agent" or "representative" will also get you through. Once you have a success notify Mr English who will post it on his website for the benefit of other customers. Let the revolution begin.
