Out of date tbh - It’s never a labyrinthine phone tree anymore, it’s a “natural speech” based menu that can never help with more than the most basic inquiries like “how much is my bill?” and still stubbornly refuses to put you in the queue for a real person.
It doesn’t even take swearing for some of them - I had one earlier this week that hung up on me when I tried pressing zero to see if that got me anywhere. Touchier than humans.
The worst is when they phrase the response as if there was just some slight, funny misunderstanding on the part of the machine; “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that! Did you want to…”
For some reason that one really drives my ire.
I’ve got a worse one than that- a fake typing sound effect. I’ve heard that one more than once.
Love to scream at my phone because the fucking robot can’t understand me.
Key presses are so simple! Why do I have to talk to the dumb fucking robot?!
I can live with hold music even for an hour because I can keep it in the background.
The absolute WORST is when they play some music for 30 seconds, then the music stops, cutting to some voice recording peddling some bullshit like “try out [Product]!” or “Use our new mobile app!”. I can’t focus on anything else with it in the background because I think each time it cuts the CSR might have picked up the line.
My personal pet peeve is when they play an ad before giving you the menu options.
First, wait thirty seconds for them to tell me how great their mobile app is. Then listen to the options, pick one, find out I picked the wrong one, and have to go back up one level. Now I have to listen to the ad again before I can hear the options.
I don’t care how proud you are of your app, I wouldn’t be calling you if I could solve my problem with it.
I haven’t had that one yet, but I’d be hitting 0 like no tomorrow and if it didn’t work once, I’d keep doing it just to drown out the ad.
FedEx has one of the worst phone support systems. It goes out of its way to tell you you’re an idiot for wanting to speak to a human being because you can’t possibly need any more information than what it has already told you. Then it proceeds to just hang up on you.
I once waited on hold for Microsoft support for 6.5 hours.
Fun fact: After hour 3 they stop playing music.
That must’ve been an expensive phone call. I hate when they leave you waiting for ages and then charge extra even though it’s wasting your time, not theirs.
Huh? You don’t pay for toll free calls. They were the ones who paid for it.
Ah some companies charge for calling their customer support, which kind of sucks because there’s a reason people call customer support (I guess it’s to scare people off from actually contacting them?) and it could get very expensive. I’m glad that wasn’t the case for you, though! That would’ve been super expensive.
