Pleasant automated voice: Thank you for calling our customer service line that doesn't work. Did you know? You can also use our online customer service tool that doesn't work
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My exact experience trying to order flowers for my mother-in-law for Xmas. They emailed to say they needed another $15 (for some reason). Phone wait time was 12 minutes but really 2 hours. Never spoke to a real person. Don’t think they employ real people and the AI and robots don’t care for flowers.
If you stay on the line you get a human operator with the worst microphone in the world, but you failed to listen through the whole 16 option keypad menu so now you’re trapped in purgatory forever.
After waiting 30 minutes, finally hit the button to leave a voice mail. The inbox is full and you just lost your place in line since you have to start all over again.
But my best advice: be kind. It's not just the right thing to do - the person on the other end is the one who can make or break whatever you're calling about. Be polite and respectful to them and they can often bend the rules or work the system to your advantage.
If they can't fix the problem, stay polite but be persistent. Kindly requesting that they escalate your case to a manager can often be what's needed to get around bureaucratic hurdles, but shouldn't be your first resort.
Welcome to the customer service switchboard dungeon, to go left, press 4, to go right, press 6, to go forward, press 2, to go backwards press 8. To attempt to contact the current room's associated cubicle, press 5.
I'm one and it's true that many of my cohort don't have a smartphone or a computer at home. I met one the other day who wouldn't have NHS hearing aids because they *can* be connected to a phone.
When I worked billing for a TelCo and we had the annual price rise, so much of it could be explained by telling them to look at their fucking bill which explained it, or to follow the link on the self-service to a video that explained the PR in a way even a complete moron could.
Likewise we had calls from boomers for “What’s my bill this month.” “£XYZ” “Ok I’ll go to the Post Office and pay it later.” “We have a self service option online—” “I DON’T DO THE INTERNET.”
As somebody who has worked CS, I can promise you, half of the people who call have absolutely not even thought of doing that. Many have not even checked if they are even connected to the network. Those who have, ironically, DON'T call.
If you’re lucky you can live chat with people for whom English is a real challenge who have never used our product and whose tech support is to copy/paste sections of the manual
My favorite:
Calling my ISP when my internet goes down: “Did you know that many of your questions about your internet service can be found in our online FAQ section? Just go to www .areyoukiddingmerightnow.com.”
Online customer service tool: Oh, your problem isn't something so mind numbingly simple you could have worked it out on your own. Please call our customer service line that doesn't work.
Last time I had to do that it gave me some random person's home phone number. That person doesn't seem happy about receiving phone calls over website problems.
We have upgraded our chatbot with predictive text masquerading as intelligence! Now it will randomly lie to you as well. Isn't technological advancement great?
Another one I love: “we are experiencing unusually high call volumes.” This one EVERY TIME I CALL. Hey Skeezix, if they’re always like that, IT IS NOT UNUSUAL!!!
JetBlue customer service yesterday, phone wait time estimated to be 30 minutes. 5 minutes in an option to do an online chat to skip the line pops up, so I try it. Wait time 2 hours for chat agent.
When my power was cut off mistakenly I had to call and that was the recorded message 'did you know you can access your account by going inline?' ::insert rage emoji::
Oh define work.
Is the goal to fix your problem?
Or get you so frustrated you throw your phone against the wall breaking it so you don't bother their customer "service" department again.
How do they not get that the phone call is the last resort after exhausting every possible way to communicate with customer service online?
Also if the problem could be resolved by pushing phone buttons, I would’ve happily done that too!
Seriously, I don’t WANT to talk to you if I don’t have to.
I am convinced that these automated features are intentionally bad, to dissuade people from complaining. If they make it too hard to get ahold of someone, they don’t have to fix or replace what’s broken or not working.
They are they literally are The less people call the less people they have to have on the phones and the less refunds it etc that those people have to get, -seasoned tech support
Some places you are better off calling customer service, other places the online chat with a real person is best. But the chatbot assistants will screw you most of the time by design.
Literally went through this, this morning. Except it took 3 minutes of listening to "useful" messages for the automated system to let me know that I couldn't use it today.
Customer service is the mythical questing beast that eludes both the begrudged buyer and the beleaguered clerk: only the too worldly entrepreneur claims absolute knowledge of it, and could show it to you, if it only meant something other than giving you your dollar's full value, alas.
50% of the time I have to physically go into an Xfinity retail location to pay my bill because their website will just refuse to load the bill pay page due to some internal server error.
Like, bill pay should be the *one* thing on a company's website that works 100% of the time.
Wanted to speak with Comcast. The menu bot pleaded with me multiple times to use their AI chat. It would not give me a human option until I screamed "REPRESENTATIVE!" about 20 times.
If you ever have to return equipment to them, mail it. Make them wait. I opted to return a modem to their store, and they just put you in line with everyone else who is there making a purchase or getting service. 20 minutes sitting just to hand a clerk a box.
And, if you DON’T have any of their equipment, they hound you with a bill for 12 months to pay for something you never had that you didn’t return because you didn’t have it. Former Comcast customer. Moved July 2023, pestered, via e-mail until July 2024.
Please stay on the line. Your call is very important to us. Not important enough for us to hire actual humans to answer, but whatever you want to tell yourself.
…who takes down all the information you’ve already given to the robots, politely listens to you complaint, says they can help you with that can I please put you on a brief hold, and then disconnects
Some of these systems try to detect swear words, which signal that the customer is angry, and prioritize connecting the angry customer to a human. So the moral of the story is: be nice to the human, but don't feel bad about cussing at robots.
It's especially fun when it's the customer-disservice line for your internet provider. I'm calling you because I *can't* get online - how's your web portal supposed to help *now*??
would you like to skip the line and have us to call you back at the worst possible time? press 1, followed by needlessly giving us the number we already have logged
I am generally anti-A.I. but if it could make online and over the phone customer service fast and effective (with the option to talk to a real person too), I could change my mind.
“We have contracted with a service provider to film your ear with the most grating, poorly tuned music imaginable and interrupt it every 15 seconds to encourage you to give up so we don’t have to pay to fix your problem we caused”
You'd be surprised. Reminds me of when you visit an online store and you get this giant intrusive popup to subscribe to their newsletter or whatever that you have to maneuver out of. Like do you or do you not want my money?
Don't worry: if you shout "OPERATOR" 20 times we'll connect you to a call center on the other side of the world staffed by people we spent 30 minutes training.
When I worked phones they used those surveys to justify giving people like a 1% or lower yearly raise, though if you have high scores maybe you get a 2% raise!
If you do have a big issue or problem, rant about that shit in the free form portion of the survey or hell just send 100 emails. Us phone ppl want to help but sometimes we can't do what you want
Let’s play fifteen seconds of the world’s worst music and interrupt it to remind you that the online customer service tool, the one that just told you to call us, is available without wait times. Now, back to the dirges of hell.
Please stay on the line as long as you’d like waiting for a service representative who will never appear. If you’d like you can leave your number so we can send you endless useless spam.
Me when I worked for a small business that had Comcast for internet, phone and credit card processing; it’s all down and I’m on my personal cell phone listening to how I could resolve the issue online…if I could GET online you stupid voice!
The most aggravating thing is when you know what digits to enter, but you have to wait until they go through the spiel in order to do it. @joshmankiewicz.bsky.social
I don’t get road rage, and I’m generally fine if I have to wait in line with other people for a really long time, but for some reason I become a person that simply is not myself whenever I hear the sound of an automated robot voice on the phone. Like I get so angry so fast it’s scary.
They'll answer & hang up on you before you said a word, then you have to call back and get back in the queue. I've gotten ping ponged back and forth to different departments because it's an actual bug & they never got trained on handling it because the company assumes every call is a user issue
This is like maybe the one conspiracy theory I can get behind because it just makes sense. The fewer people to make it through is fewer issues they have to handle, which is fewer man hours, fewer refunds, fewer anything they have to provide on their end that costs money
Absolutely. If profit is the only motive, you want callers to hang up. The not-for-profit org where I work has a call center. One of their main KPIs (watched closely by our board) is “Abandon rate,” or the % of callers who hang-up before speaking w/a human. If they exceed 2.5% it’s A Problem.
Comments
Got that? Goodbye.
"0" is often (but not always) an escape key - pressing it during a prompt may route you directly to a human.
If a phone tree uses speech recognition, swearing at it loudly can also sometimes route you to a human.
If it's a policy issue, you need to find the right person who can circumvent it. Polite persistence is key.
And the same bank!
And the same internet service!
And the same utilities!
Well why are you paying for broadband, Karen?!?!
Calling my ISP when my internet goes down: “Did you know that many of your questions about your internet service can be found in our online FAQ section? Just go to www .areyoukiddingmerightnow.com.”
Chase's site the several times I've tried to use the offer: this part of our site isn't working right now
Chase's support when reporting errors: error sending message
Chase's phone support: *automated system hangs up
Me: so credit union then?
*normal on a sunday 1992
https://bsky.app/profile/internethippo.bsky.social/post/3lewiorsiyk2e
Click
*It's 2.p.m.*
Remember when multi-billion dollar corporations actually employed tech support? Yeah, those were the days. - Jamie Zawinski
Is the goal to fix your problem?
Or get you so frustrated you throw your phone against the wall breaking it so you don't bother their customer "service" department again.
3:O((>
Also if the problem could be resolved by pushing phone buttons, I would’ve happily done that too!
Seriously, I don’t WANT to talk to you if I don’t have to.
Like, bill pay should be the *one* thing on a company's website that works 100% of the time.
Also, make sure you know how to contact the public agency that investigates business fraud in your area.
Me: grunting and screeching until the system gives up and transfers me to a human
Press 2 to end this call so we don't have to deal with you
Anything less than the top score counts as nothing and those survey responses dictate bonus payouts for phone people
because it also doesnt work
Pls help i have a problem
Ai voice of what a weird tech bro thinks a woman sounds like:
Thanks for calling have you consider shuting the fuck up you peasant
Customer:wow thanks
Ai:fuck off
Don't forget the multiple meal breaks right when most people are off work
"Thank you for calling our internet services line. Did you know you can use our handy website at InternetServices dot com for faster support?"
🤬
Caller: Are you a real?
Me: Last time I checked…
😂
*not in the last 10 years