"For directions and store hours, press 1. To make a payment, press 2. For warranty matters, press 3. To hear more options, press 4. To repeat this menu, press 9." You sigh deeply and press 4. Five more menus and countless keypresses later, you hear, "Please hold for the next available representative. The wait time is currently 23 minutes." Aaaargh!
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, the folks at 9News in Denver pointed to a resource that can help you avoid that kind of customer support hell. The gethuman™ project was started by Kayak.com entrepreneur Paul English to work for better customer service phone systems and support. They offer some general tips for finding phone numbers and coping with phone systems, and they have a database of 500 companies’ phone numbers and specific instructions for reaching a human being at each.
They’ve also developed a standard that defines how a phone system should behave. If your business uses a menu system for inbound calls, you can make your callers much happier by paying attention to the gethuman standard.