h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Call centres are fine, but the ever-growing nightmare of the automatic call routing system is a growing phenomenon over here in the UK.

For instance...
(ring ring) (click!)..

Welcome to BigCorp PLC.
Please press the star button on your telephone twice to begin

If you know the extention number of the person you wish to contact, please dial the seventy-four digit number now.

Thankyou.
Your call is important to us, please wait while we ignore it.

All of our operators are currently busy ignoring other callers. Your call is in a queue and will be answered when someone can be bothered.
You are position thirteen in the queue.
The average time to reach the top of the queue is forty three days

You now have seven choices.
To be put through to sales, please press 1. Your call will be instantly connected to someone who doesn't know anything about your problem, but will be able to sell you anything we manufacture that you don't want.
To be put on hold listening to increasingly irritating muzak, please press 2.
To order a pizza while you are waiting, please press 3
To be patronised about how important your call is to us, please press 4
To listen to these choices again, please press 5
To be transferred to the call queueing system in the complaints department, please press 6
Finally, to be disconnected for no apparently good reason, please press 7

There are still a few people using phones without stars. They have to go out in the rain to find a public call box (probably vandalised) or a more up-to-date neighbour.I think the longest and most irritating queue I've ever been in was to try and get a working visa out of the Australian consulate in Manchester and it cost a fortune at peak rates.

Very well observed. You are evidently a veteran of the automated phone web. But surely you forgot one vital point. Does this sound familiar ...


'Good afternoon, your through to Simon, how can I help?'
' ..... don't hang up, don't hang up DON'T HANG UP Are you still there?'
'Yes sir, how can I help?'
'Thank God. I was just having a bath while I waited. Thank God you didn't hang up - I could hear you on the speakerphone. I didn't realise you'd answer so quick.'
'Yes, sir. How can I help?'
'Well I'm having trouble with my connection.'
'Ah, I see, sir. You'll need to speak to one of our fault advisors.'
'The number .. you require is .... '

Press any key is used in connection with a bit of kit known as an IVR and help to route calls to the correct type of person.(pereferably human, speaking the same language and knowing what they are talking anout)howeve quite often the customer pushes the wrong key and as such has problems. A simple cource in recognising spoken language and how that translates to symbols especially writen numbres can assist with this.

Occasionally, the customer gets so fed up waiting that they start pressing keys at random. This apparently results in being connected to the administration interface of the call queueing system, allowing you to change the outgoing greeting to variants of the original text in this thread, as one enterprising NTL customer recently discovered.

He was let off because the message he left (containing several words that would get this conversation moderated) was apparently not obscene enough.

That or the judge had previously experienced customer service NTL-style.