"Get Human" & Bypass Phone Trees... (employee, companies, credit card)

[Baltic_Celt]

** Snarky rant alert. Proceed at your own caution. Watch children carefully. **

Wasn't sure which forum to use, but this may be helpful to many, despite my sarcasm.

I just found this today, after 1-wk of headaches brought on by numerous customer service calls. Who knew it took 3-days, 6-phone calls/day & transfers to 3 depts to check on a gas company billing question? Thank goodness it wasn't a problem, otherwise I might still be on hold.

"gethuman dot com" is a very thorough site listing 800#'s for about 100 companies (many in US, Canada & UK), all alphabetized, & the work around for getting passed the telephone prompts to speak to an actual human being. Also offers a place to report a problem or add comments.

I'm fairly patient, but do feel it challenged when phone trees bring me full circle after 3-4 minutes & my 2nd time entering the same 18-digit account # & last 4-digits of my SS#, to the prompt I once began! I'm in Canada, but call the US a lot, so this has separate issues. Since rumor has it that humans actually still do work at these enormous companies... this may provide an easier way to reach one of these scarcely unearthed beings. When you reach one, ask them to look to their left & right & report if Sasquatch or Jimmy Hoffa are by their side. They're generally spotted more often than Bell Mobility or credit card company employees. Ever try to reach your ISP? Yea, good luck... we'll be here on C-D next spring, waiting for when you get through & report back.

Snarky rant over. Hope this list is helpful.

No, I'm not angry... yes, I am very tongue in cheek. I've seen other lists for other companies. If anyone has a link, please append it to this post. It would be nice to find them all in 1 place. I'll leave the snarkiness up to you...

Lastly, I tried this with a Canadian phone company last week... just repeat "Operator" at each prompt. Many automated prompts recognize the word, although it's not a mentioned option. It did ask, however, which dept operator I wanted, so I said billing. I've heard that the word "Agent" works with some companies, as well. Good luck.

[HIF]

I'm not sure that I remember how to speak to a human for customer service issues but I appreciate the digits- I think I'll put it on my speed dial!

[AksarbeN]

ACD Automatic Call Distributors are a great thing for many businesses however they have grown into monsters when companies started adding more and more sections to distribute the calls, and worse automated answering to the FAQs that seem to come up. It’s madding when your call doesn’t fit the their questions and you only fall deeper into the never ending hole.

I’ve learned that using the 0 repeatedly sometimes helps to get to an end of the nonsense of ACD, also the # key tells the system that you’re at the end of dialing and will occasionally help get an operator on line to take the call.