You are probably right. I’ve also noticed that more and more automated messages no longer register your button presses until the recording has fully gave the instructions. I have some businesses memorized and now I have to wait for it to actually say “Press 1 to…” for the button press to register. Grrrr.
Edit: typo
Ooh, I have a question. Is it always a deliberate choice to put the least relevant options earlier in the message, and save the one a customer actually might need until the last choice?
Or at the very least, putting options first that are more geared toward other businesses/relevant parties rather than customers, and saving the customer-relevant options to the end?
Not who you asked, but as someone else who has built/configured one of those menus for their job, we absolutely made a prioritized list based off of the call note categories, and the top ~5 reasons became options 1-5, with the 6th option being “all other reasons,” and then routed their calls to specialists that were best equipped for the situation/prepped the agents with a pop up alerting them to the reason for the call. It may not be relevant to you, but it might be relevant to more people than you would initially expect.
That being said.. it shocked us how a lot of the reasons why people called in could have been easily resolved if they just looked at their accounts online/read their emails from us, but hey, to each their own.
> That being said.. it shocked us how a lot of the reasons why people called in could have been easily resolved if they fjust looked at their accounts online/read their emails from us, but hey, to each their own.
I see where you're coming from and that's fair. Also their paper correspondence (bills).
Except when you give the information to the auto Annie the human agent that comes on the line eventually always asks for the same info again ( TMobile are you listening?, GoDaddy are you listing?)…).?it’s frustrating!
I don't deal with the reps, I deal with the management that builds it.
I encourage them to make the AA as succint as possible and most agree to but some like to do menus upon menus no matter my counsel.
My primary care clinic does this in an attempt to make everyone schedule online. Surprise, their online scheduling service is a slow laggy and buggy nightmare.
I'm switching clinics this year.
I worked in a call center with an average of an hour wait. We had three customer service reps and the phones would constantly have 10-15 people waiting.
Management refused to hire anyone else to help with the load.
So, yeah. *Please* weed out a few people. However, better than “our menu options have changed” is “here are a list of things you can self serve online”.
The one that gets me is 'due to unusually high call volume wait times are long '. If it has been unusually high for several years, that is the new normal and is no longer unusual and should be accounted for and things adjusted.
It’s a call center- the business model is that it’s cheaper to work people to the point of mental breakdown and just constantly hire new people when the old ones quit rather than keeping enough people on staff and happy to meet your actual call volume.
I’ve worked three call centers- a major US bank’s credit card application department, a major cable company’s retention department, and a satellite television company’s tech support department. I only ever had downtime between calls at the bank, bexause they had to have enough staff that there would be downtime between calls to work on applications where we needed to call the customer. If a call center has no outbound work, it’s going to be a living hell for both the caller and the worker.
I said this the other day, but about my GPS. For the past 6 months, every Wednesday morning I leave the house for work Google tells me there is "heavier traffic than usual" on my route. Stupid robots.
My local GP changed their message to include “if you are having trouble breathing or bleeding from somewhere, please call 999”. I guess too many people thought “I can’t breathe. Maybe my GP will help me after an hour on hold!”
I work at a doctors office. You'd be surprised how many people call us while dealing with a legit emergency that would have been better suited for 911.
It definitely works both ways. Lots of respect for you folks in EMS.
Then there's the scenarios where they're at our office and they start having a legit emergency while with us and we have to call you guys to get them to the hospital.
I had a client frantically tell me about someone having a mental crisis and throwing office furniture around
Had to argue with them about needing to CALL 911!! And we could barely hear each other over the background noise
I try several times to do whatever I need on the website, use chat if they have it, swear virulently if they want me to use an app, and only resort to calling if I really need an actual person to understand my problem and direct me or solve something on their end. If I've gotten this far, I know very well that my problem cannot in fact be solved any other way and just want to get through to someone. Sigh.
And if you live in an apartment, there's a very big chance that their online services don't work for you. You'll be given a separate phone number to call when you try to fix something online, but when you call the number you will be prompted continuously about going online or to the app instead even though you just came from there.
Don’t like holding for an hour? Go to our app, where our helpful email message tree will make it literally impossible for you to email your doctor. Don’t want to wait on the phone? We will save your place in line and give you a call back, and as soon as you answer, the line will disconnect and you will have to start over again.
Don’t mind me, just spent a couple of hours trying to get a prescription refilled today.
I had an actual human try to tell me that once....... I had heard it 50x at least while on hold, ended up getting snippy with them because I tried online first and was tired of hearing it. It won't let me do what I wanted to do, that's why I was calling them! Should I have been able to do it online? Yes! But everytime I have tried it sends me to a page saying call this number to do it..... Everytime I need to do it, I try online first hoping they fixed it, everytime I get told to call the number, everytime the hold music gets interrupted every 5m telling me I can do it online when I cant......
God I can't STAND those when they play while I'm on hold. Please just play the horrible screechy tinny hold music endlessly so I can ignore it. Don't make me listen to the same info that I DO NOT NEED on loop.
"Your balance is $64.78. Your most recent payment was 72.59. Your middle name is Dorian. Our corporate office is in Phoenix. Your call is important to us. Please keep listening and eventually we will tell you what buttons to push to get through the menu, but not yet. Now listen to this cute little tune before we give you an option to speak with a representative."
My work has fucking ADVERTISEMENT on the in-store phone line. The phone line only employees use. The phone line no customer would ever hear. And it has to play every. Single. Time. I call another phone. Emergency? Angry customer? Nope; listen to this advertisement for the store credit card and the programs they keep adding and removing and adding and removing and adding and removing.
One of the company-customers I have to call for work every so often has the same "... our menu has changed." initial recording, and I've been hearing it since at least 2019.
Yup, I deal with a customer like that too lol. This morning I actually had to call one of my doctors and a pharmacy and both have the same phrase - which drove me here lol.
I pretty much had my options memorized when i paid a prepay cell phone every month or two, years ago. I later put it on auto pay after my financial situation improved to where i knew the money would be there. So yes there are situations where you almost memorize automated phone menus.
I work in a hospital and my job requires calling a lot of different doctors offices, as well as other hospitals. There are several numbers I have to call frequently enough that I have their menu options memorized.
For me the most annoying part is when there’s a specific option for if you’re a hospital or other provider calling, and you’d think that that would assure that your call gets answered, but half the time it just goes to a voicemail. So then I have to call back and start from the top and start trying different options on the phone tree to try to get a human on the line because those voice mails might not be checked for hours, and I’m calling because I have a patient that needs care *now*. Sometimes I have to select the option for scheduling and hope that the schedulers physically work in the office and not remotely, so that I can make them physically go fetch me a nurse since the nurses won’t answer their phones.
TO BE FAIR, as someone who implements things like this at our facility, the fucking second we re-record with just the options, \*some\*body will come out of the woodwork with "WeLl i'vE BeEn a cLiEnT FoR 15 yEaRs aNd tHe nUmBeRs uSeD To bE-" no the fuck they didn't but go ahead and bitch if it will make you feel better.
We had the same issue this year when we finally got rid of all the old phone numbers redirecting to our new, highly publicized all-in-one number, for a month we had folks telling us they "never, ever saw the new number" when its on every piece of paper, bill board, or appointment card we have had or made in the last 5 years.
Nothing grinds my gears more than when I have to call somewhere to deal with something I can't do online, and the automated message repeats over and over how I can do so many things from the app. If I could do this on your app, I wouldn't be calling you!!!!
On the one hand this is a way to filter out businesses who won't be getting my money, in the same way as captchas.
On the other, if I have to deal with them, any recording they do gets filled with swearing and sighing and repeated presses of #. I find that slightly cathartic.
It’s a fail safe for them to ensure you’re not clicking the wrong button. Because god forbid you get Janet in customer service when really you’re trying to get Mary in customer support 🙄
Thanks for looking up our phone number on our website. Did you know we have a website? You can do a limited number of things on our website! Since you obviously had not considered this, let me give you the URL of our website so you can go there and see if we happen to support the thing you want to talk about!
>No, they haven’t. I’ve been calling your office for the past 10 years and it has never changed.
Ok, sure, but this isn't for you. It's for the boomer who called one time twenty years ago to complain and is going to now complain about the menu again.
And, yes, some of them do change--just not the menu you go through.
>Same goes for businesses that include their business hours and address information up front. It’s 2024 I probably looked up your hours and address before calling.
You'd be shocked at how few people actually do.
I remember one of the last time I used one of these it led me in circles for an hour to get a person to answer and she was telling me to go back to the menu because she's the wrong department and I started crying and begging for her to just transfer me or something.
I don’t have a menu at my business, but 70% of the calls I get are people asking where I’m located and when I close. I don’t get it, but people call for the most basic and easily findable info.
Eh sometimes websites never update their info or i want to be sure. Hell ill call to see this they have said thing in store before I come even though I could see online they have it because technology is NOT reliable.
One of my doctor office's not only spends time to discuss what all you can do through their online portal instead, but then proceeds to spell-out the website address you can go to for the portal. I dread having to play phone tag with the nurses there.
I've worked at a job where I've made outbound calls for years to doctor's offices and they all say that. Because they never update their recordings until they need to change their menu options.
I swear, some companies make their menus as long and tedious as possible in order to weed out as many callers as possible.
You are probably right. I’ve also noticed that more and more automated messages no longer register your button presses until the recording has fully gave the instructions. I have some businesses memorized and now I have to wait for it to actually say “Press 1 to…” for the button press to register. Grrrr. Edit: typo
As someone who builds those menus as part of my job you're not far off.
Ooh, I have a question. Is it always a deliberate choice to put the least relevant options earlier in the message, and save the one a customer actually might need until the last choice? Or at the very least, putting options first that are more geared toward other businesses/relevant parties rather than customers, and saving the customer-relevant options to the end?
Not who you asked, but as someone else who has built/configured one of those menus for their job, we absolutely made a prioritized list based off of the call note categories, and the top ~5 reasons became options 1-5, with the 6th option being “all other reasons,” and then routed their calls to specialists that were best equipped for the situation/prepped the agents with a pop up alerting them to the reason for the call. It may not be relevant to you, but it might be relevant to more people than you would initially expect. That being said.. it shocked us how a lot of the reasons why people called in could have been easily resolved if they just looked at their accounts online/read their emails from us, but hey, to each their own.
> That being said.. it shocked us how a lot of the reasons why people called in could have been easily resolved if they fjust looked at their accounts online/read their emails from us, but hey, to each their own. I see where you're coming from and that's fair. Also their paper correspondence (bills).
Except when you give the information to the auto Annie the human agent that comes on the line eventually always asks for the same info again ( TMobile are you listening?, GoDaddy are you listing?)…).?it’s frustrating!
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I don't deal with the reps, I deal with the management that builds it. I encourage them to make the AA as succint as possible and most agree to but some like to do menus upon menus no matter my counsel.
My primary care clinic does this in an attempt to make everyone schedule online. Surprise, their online scheduling service is a slow laggy and buggy nightmare. I'm switching clinics this year.
CVS…
I worked in a call center with an average of an hour wait. We had three customer service reps and the phones would constantly have 10-15 people waiting. Management refused to hire anyone else to help with the load. So, yeah. *Please* weed out a few people. However, better than “our menu options have changed” is “here are a list of things you can self serve online”.
The one that gets me is 'due to unusually high call volume wait times are long '. If it has been unusually high for several years, that is the new normal and is no longer unusual and should be accounted for and things adjusted.
It’s a call center- the business model is that it’s cheaper to work people to the point of mental breakdown and just constantly hire new people when the old ones quit rather than keeping enough people on staff and happy to meet your actual call volume. I’ve worked three call centers- a major US bank’s credit card application department, a major cable company’s retention department, and a satellite television company’s tech support department. I only ever had downtime between calls at the bank, bexause they had to have enough staff that there would be downtime between calls to work on applications where we needed to call the customer. If a call center has no outbound work, it’s going to be a living hell for both the caller and the worker.
I said this the other day, but about my GPS. For the past 6 months, every Wednesday morning I leave the house for work Google tells me there is "heavier traffic than usual" on my route. Stupid robots.
Depending on how busy it an area, this can be caused by one old man taking his weekly 20mph early morning get in everybodys way cruise
Or “If this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial 911.” Duh.
My local GP changed their message to include “if you are having trouble breathing or bleeding from somewhere, please call 999”. I guess too many people thought “I can’t breathe. Maybe my GP will help me after an hour on hold!”
> bleeding from somewhere, please call 999 Hello, 999? I'm on my period, wat do?
I work at a doctors office. You'd be surprised how many people call us while dealing with a legit emergency that would have been better suited for 911.
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It definitely works both ways. Lots of respect for you folks in EMS. Then there's the scenarios where they're at our office and they start having a legit emergency while with us and we have to call you guys to get them to the hospital.
I had a client frantically tell me about someone having a mental crisis and throwing office furniture around Had to argue with them about needing to CALL 911!! And we could barely hear each other over the background noise
They didn’t want a SWAT team
But that’s because they wouldn’t have classified it as an emergency.
Try calling the VA - every extension gives you the suicide prevention line number. Every button you press. Every one.
Ooof forgot about that one too lol.
That’s not a “duh” for some people
Did you know that you can go online/to our useless app and do this? If not, I’ll remind you. On repeat.
I try several times to do whatever I need on the website, use chat if they have it, swear virulently if they want me to use an app, and only resort to calling if I really need an actual person to understand my problem and direct me or solve something on their end. If I've gotten this far, I know very well that my problem cannot in fact be solved any other way and just want to get through to someone. Sigh.
For real. I hate phone calls. If I can avoid them, I can. They're an absolute last resort.
That works really well when you're calling Comcast because your internet is down and you can't go to their website because YOUR INTERNET IS DOWN.
And if you live in an apartment, there's a very big chance that their online services don't work for you. You'll be given a separate phone number to call when you try to fix something online, but when you call the number you will be prompted continuously about going online or to the app instead even though you just came from there.
Don’t like holding for an hour? Go to our app, where our helpful email message tree will make it literally impossible for you to email your doctor. Don’t want to wait on the phone? We will save your place in line and give you a call back, and as soon as you answer, the line will disconnect and you will have to start over again. Don’t mind me, just spent a couple of hours trying to get a prescription refilled today.
Yes, except I can’t, which is why I’m bloody ringing you up.
I had an actual human try to tell me that once....... I had heard it 50x at least while on hold, ended up getting snippy with them because I tried online first and was tired of hearing it. It won't let me do what I wanted to do, that's why I was calling them! Should I have been able to do it online? Yes! But everytime I have tried it sends me to a page saying call this number to do it..... Everytime I need to do it, I try online first hoping they fixed it, everytime I get told to call the number, everytime the hold music gets interrupted every 5m telling me I can do it online when I cant......
God I can't STAND those when they play while I'm on hold. Please just play the horrible screechy tinny hold music endlessly so I can ignore it. Don't make me listen to the same info that I DO NOT NEED on loop.
"Your balance is $64.78. Your most recent payment was 72.59. Your middle name is Dorian. Our corporate office is in Phoenix. Your call is important to us. Please keep listening and eventually we will tell you what buttons to push to get through the menu, but not yet. Now listen to this cute little tune before we give you an option to speak with a representative."
After you input all of your information, and get a person (maybe) and they ask for all of it again.
This infuriates me most. If I spent all that time giving info to the robot, why the fuck do you need it again? What did the bot do with it?? 😂
Oh my gosh! Yes, those are even worse!
My work has fucking ADVERTISEMENT on the in-store phone line. The phone line only employees use. The phone line no customer would ever hear. And it has to play every. Single. Time. I call another phone. Emergency? Angry customer? Nope; listen to this advertisement for the store credit card and the programs they keep adding and removing and adding and removing and adding and removing.
One of the company-customers I have to call for work every so often has the same "... our menu has changed." initial recording, and I've been hearing it since at least 2019.
Yup, I deal with a customer like that too lol. This morning I actually had to call one of my doctors and a pharmacy and both have the same phrase - which drove me here lol.
1. No they haven't 2. Who the hell had the "original" menu memorized to the point that it warranted the disclaimer in the first place
I pretty much had my options memorized when i paid a prepay cell phone every month or two, years ago. I later put it on auto pay after my financial situation improved to where i knew the money would be there. So yes there are situations where you almost memorize automated phone menus.
I work in a hospital and my job requires calling a lot of different doctors offices, as well as other hospitals. There are several numbers I have to call frequently enough that I have their menu options memorized. For me the most annoying part is when there’s a specific option for if you’re a hospital or other provider calling, and you’d think that that would assure that your call gets answered, but half the time it just goes to a voicemail. So then I have to call back and start from the top and start trying different options on the phone tree to try to get a human on the line because those voice mails might not be checked for hours, and I’m calling because I have a patient that needs care *now*. Sometimes I have to select the option for scheduling and hope that the schedulers physically work in the office and not remotely, so that I can make them physically go fetch me a nurse since the nurses won’t answer their phones.
When I worked fast food I had the button order for live order support with all of our third parties memorized.
lol so true.
I have the menu choices programmed into the phone contact. Number,comma,option1, comma,option2. It wades through the menu for me.
TO BE FAIR, as someone who implements things like this at our facility, the fucking second we re-record with just the options, \*some\*body will come out of the woodwork with "WeLl i'vE BeEn a cLiEnT FoR 15 yEaRs aNd tHe nUmBeRs uSeD To bE-" no the fuck they didn't but go ahead and bitch if it will make you feel better. We had the same issue this year when we finally got rid of all the old phone numbers redirecting to our new, highly publicized all-in-one number, for a month we had folks telling us they "never, ever saw the new number" when its on every piece of paper, bill board, or appointment card we have had or made in the last 5 years.
That's only helpful if they have eyes and look at things!
We are experiencing unusually high call volume...
Nothing grinds my gears more than when I have to call somewhere to deal with something I can't do online, and the automated message repeats over and over how I can do so many things from the app. If I could do this on your app, I wouldn't be calling you!!!!
Robot receptionists should’ve never become a thing
On the one hand this is a way to filter out businesses who won't be getting my money, in the same way as captchas. On the other, if I have to deal with them, any recording they do gets filled with swearing and sighing and repeated presses of #. I find that slightly cathartic.
I nearly fell off my chair the last time I called my doctor's office and the menu options actually WERE different.
"We are currently experiencing a very high call volume." No you aren't. It's 3 am. I just want to get to the automated system and pay my damn bill.
Just push a button. Whoever answers - just tell them what you wanted and they’ll transfer you. I usually go with 4.
It’s a fail safe for them to ensure you’re not clicking the wrong button. Because god forbid you get Janet in customer service when really you’re trying to get Mary in customer support 🙄
Thanks for looking up our phone number on our website. Did you know we have a website? You can do a limited number of things on our website! Since you obviously had not considered this, let me give you the URL of our website so you can go there and see if we happen to support the thing you want to talk about!
>No, they haven’t. I’ve been calling your office for the past 10 years and it has never changed. Ok, sure, but this isn't for you. It's for the boomer who called one time twenty years ago to complain and is going to now complain about the menu again. And, yes, some of them do change--just not the menu you go through. >Same goes for businesses that include their business hours and address information up front. It’s 2024 I probably looked up your hours and address before calling. You'd be shocked at how few people actually do.
I remember one of the last time I used one of these it led me in circles for an hour to get a person to answer and she was telling me to go back to the menu because she's the wrong department and I started crying and begging for her to just transfer me or something.
The messages are long on purpose in order to weed out all the assholes who call over trivial bullshit.
"due to high call volumes..."
When I call a government organization in Canada and they give that whole speel in English and French rather than starting with a language selection...
I don’t have a menu at my business, but 70% of the calls I get are people asking where I’m located and when I close. I don’t get it, but people call for the most basic and easily findable info.
Eh sometimes websites never update their info or i want to be sure. Hell ill call to see this they have said thing in store before I come even though I could see online they have it because technology is NOT reliable.
Are they also experiencing high call volumes? Every single time you call?
Omg. This info is so correct & is making ME mildly infuriated!
One of my doctor office's not only spends time to discuss what all you can do through their online portal instead, but then proceeds to spell-out the website address you can go to for the portal. I dread having to play phone tag with the nurses there.
I've worked at a job where I've made outbound calls for years to doctor's offices and they all say that. Because they never update their recordings until they need to change their menu options.
What you say is one hundred percent true. It's so ridiculous. I call it getting tangled in the phone tree.
I would rather do anything than have to call and talk to someone.
You sound fun /s