I've noticed a lot more evil choose-your-own-adventure phone menus these days resort to "Sorry, I couldn't understand" / "Sorry, I still couldn't understand" / "Sorry, your input could not be processed. Goodbye."

Yep, ye tricks of olde like repeatedly saying „help“ or „customer service“ don’t seem to work on those… i recently dealt with an especially frustrating case when moving and buying a brand-new fiber connection. Turns out, they got the activation date wrong, so I called the support hotline mentioned in the confirmation mail. The menu prompted me for my customer ID - which I didn’t yet have - and wouldn’t let me through, even after trying all possible options. In the end, I just called the sales hotline and let them handle the transfer…

I particularly hate the ones that just hang up if you guess wrong three times.

Yep, we had a few IVRs set up like that for clients at an old job. The reality was there for those was that there was no pool of agents we could transfer those calls to, it was set up to be an entirely automated system by request from the client.

It was mainly for doctor appointment reminders, though, so hopefully those called still had their appointments written down somewhere (or also signed up for email reminders).

My thumb rule is always dial the number where the company hopes you'll be handing over money, rarely fails to get me faster to a person who can help or transfer. Schedule appointment, Re-order Supplies, and Billing Questions are always much better than the Cancel service or Tech Support

Do they not just say they'll forward you to the right department and drop you into a hold queue though? I've done this a few times when the support department had a broken automation flow and it got me to the queue, but the people at the well manned department didn't actually do the support for me.

Generally phone systems like that are set up so forwarded calls jump the queue. This is to avoid people getting stuck in a queue for a long time twice.

You're usually better off letting the IVR route you to the first dialogue tree option at least before you start spamming, otherwise you get the 'idiots who can't listen to dialogue tree' receptionist who has to transfer you to someone else anyway but might not get you to the right place on the first try.

I’ve once skipped “Search your problem through our docs” and clicked “Call Support” only to be told off like a pupil that I didn’t read the docs, really like a kid.

It surprised me coming from Apple Business Manager. It was unprofessional. Don’t skip the docs, guys!

Result: As expected, my problem wasn’t solved by following their 18-step DUNS/Apple process during the last 8 month. (My problem: My company changed both address and name, they still have both addresses with the old one as primary).

I'm fine with getting the router human.

I've, um, heard, that more sophisticated phone trees react to profanity by connecting you to a person more quickly, using the logic that you sound pretty upset and need help now.

I ran a network & voice refresh project for a national financial institution a few years ago; during the RFT some vendors pitched a stress analysis element for the contact center & IVR systems. The institution demurred, citing (amongst other concerns) the likelihood of it being gamed.

It's probably smart for a few reasons. Given limited support resources, do you really want to spent all of them on furious people? If it takes five times as long to help one irate customer with a complex situation, at some point that has to enter the calculus.

Can confirm I had grammar for testing for various profanity and took that into consideration for whether to send to customer service in the IVR apps I developed.

The client really didn't want people sent to live agents if at all possible, as they only had a certain low number of agents and wanted to keep it that way, so we had extra prompts that tried to convince the user to give the app a try first before we did a transfer to an agent, but it was something that could start the process off.

And this was an IVR app for a Fortune 500 corporation, not a small company.

What about the sophisticated ones that say, "listen to all or of options as out menu has recently changed." When you call back two years later the message is exactly the same. Why don't they make call handling software that has the menu items assigned to random numbers so that the menu is always different?

I think this and "higher than usual call volumes" are really just about plausible deniability. Anyone who's worked retail will have a story about someone who insists that the thing they're buying was cheaper last week even though it wasn't. Telling people up front that things have changed probably at least sometimes defuses that conversation one way or another before it even happens.

If you have the option of having dual-language queues then you can also opt to the secondary language which generally has fewer callers than the primary. So you get to the front of the line faster, and they also tend to speak the primary language.

Interesting; I'll have to try this. In my experience pressing 0 has a decent chance of working as a shortcut to a human operator (versus choose-your-own-adventure DFS searching for the right node in the menu tree, which can take ages), but obviously it doesn't work when they don't have human operators at all.