Don't remember if I've written about this before or not but I need to share this with all of you: I hate speech recognition phone trees. Hate them. Can't stand them. I mean, all phone trees are a nuisance at best but the speech recognition ones are the worst. If you want me to press 2 for the reservation desk that's one thing. When you want me to say the name of the departure airline and the last name of the traveler we are clearly beyond your capabilities.
Today I had to call American about a flight. The traveler was flying from Miami to Sao Paulo and he had an Hispanic last name. The phone tree didn't recognize the flight number so it had me list the airports. With only some pain, we finally agreed on the same particular airplane. Then it wanted to know the name of the guy. We hit a complete wall. After three stabs at it, I finally just started sharply saying 'Agent!' into the phone. Eventually it connected me to an honest to Bog person who quickly (less than 20 seconds) gave me the info I needed. Frustrating to say the least.
Look, I know that phone trees are here to stay. They really do serve a sorting need that would otherwise tie up a person. But. Don't overestimate how much you can really use them. Please don't. Three questions should be an absolute maximum, then into the appropriate pool. If it takes more questions than that, you need to think about how you've divvied your labor pool. Of if you've jammed too many functions into one phone line.
There are ways around the phone trees, I know but I hate to use them. I work behind one of those trees and I hate the ten calls I get each day where I have to transfer someone to the correct place. It annoys everyone and wastes all of our time. Much better if they listen to the prompts and press the correct numbers. (On a related note, it seems that my company routes anyone who simply presses '0' into some holding limbo where they sit for a good half hour. Or at least this is what I've picked up anecdotally.)
Does anyone else think that these systems would be much better if various CEO's made a habit of calling their own company about once a month or so?
1 comment:
After an entire year of talking to insurance companies, I've finally found that saying 'Representative"
works like a charm.
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