0845 numbers and menu systems

Soldato
Joined
3 Feb 2008
Posts
5,557
What's too much? I have a problem, and no other way of resolving it quickly but to ring an 0845 number. I've just been put through the most convoluted menu system of meaningless information to finally speak to some guy who tells me I've rang the wrong number, and the number I need to ring, is the very number I've just ******* called.

Not to mention at every possibly opportunity they inform me how I can (not) resolve the problem by going to their website, taking as long as humanly possible to tell me of the address. Oh and informing me the menu system has changed since last time so they can 'quickly get to the bottom of your problem'. Meaning everyone figured out the last menu system, so they've switched it up to keep us here longer.

Then we move onto the usual "We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment" rubbish. I bet you'd be dealing with these pretty quick if you were paying for the call you bunch of useless monkeys.

Now half the time not even the sayno website can help. They just say you need to ring back on the 0845 number to speak to anyone.

All this because Parcel Force dropped a parcel off at the post office, someone signed for it, and they're now denying all knowledge of its existence.

Now normally I don't get hugely annoyed having to go through the above rigmarole (And I rarely have problems with RM), but this has felt an exceptionally bad case of abusing a premium rate phone line.

I had another problem with mobilephonesdirect, who kept me on a premium rate line for 8 minutes only to hang up the call at the end with no option of doing anything else. That has to be illegal! It's nothing but theft!

[/vent]
 
I normally just hit the # or * keys a load of times, the system assumes you're confused or the phone isn't working properly and it puts you through to a human straight away :)
 
Helplines and menus, the experience is quite often awful. Some businesses appear just not to care about customer satisfaction and are just interested in taking your money from the calls.
 
I have spoken to an engineer from a large telephone queuing system about this before. The cryptic menu systems are designed to get you not to ring, and use the web page they advertise within the call menu system.

A very large high street bank used this to substantially lower the incoming call volume, and make people use its web version. They project plan was make the call menu system so complicated with dead ends and false positives, that the ringer would give up.
 
As someone who designs and manages the IVR (those telephonic menu systems) for a large company, I can only apologise for the shoddy design used by the company you called.

I'm constantly reviewing customer journeys through our IVRs, tie it back with call logs, look at ways to create new methods of self-serving so that high call queues don't impact those with simple requests.

Just because an IVR is designed with the majority of callers in mind and doesn't give you exactly what you need in an instance doesn't make them bad.
 
I've heard about this method but I've never once had it work!

We disable it on our IVRs a few years ago, people think they are being clever, but it actually doesn't help if they get stuck in a queue for 10 minutes only to end up in the wrong department, have to be transferred, queue for another 5, then get all uppity that they have wasted 15 minutes queueing even though it is THEIR fault.
 
I've noticed a recent trend of not letting you input numbers until the voice has stopped talking - particularly with banks & credit cards. I used to be able to cut off the explanation by pressing the numbers I needed, but now they won't register until that stupid woman has finished describing exactly how to enter your date of birth in number format and given you three examples.
 
Ha! That's nothing.

I spent 30 minutes trying to call nPower this morning. Each time going through the "press 1 for x.." only to be greeted with a long pause and ultimately a disconnection. Even calling numbers I'd Google'd got me nowhere and usually that does the trick if you can't get through straight away.

I tend to mash # or just don't press a button and you get put through straight away. Even that failed :(
 
I used to admin our phone system at my last place. I was given the list by management what they wanted etc. Me and Contractor(He was helping me and training me) looked at it and expressed our concerns. The order was laid out like this:

Welcome to **** Press 1 for accounts, 2 for sales, 3 technical, 4 for engineering, 5 for project management or 0 for other enquiries.

When pressing 1 - 5 it would then list all the relavent staff (Which was a few). After ex amount of rings it would go to VM and we werent allowed to record our own it had to be done by one person :S.

0 rang all the phones, except everyone jsut pressed 0 lol.

One of the worst laid out systems ive ever used/seen. It was very capable of lossing customers in it.
 
As someone who designs and manages the IVR (those telephonic menu systems) for a large company, I can only apologise for the shoddy design used by the company you called.

I'm constantly reviewing customer journeys through our IVRs, tie it back with call logs, look at ways to create new methods of self-serving so that high call queues don't impact those with simple requests.

Just because an IVR is designed with the majority of callers in mind and doesn't give you exactly what you need in an instance doesn't make them bad.

Who for?


We disable it on our IVRs a few years ago, people think they are being clever, but it actually doesn't help if they get stuck in a queue for 10 minutes only to end up in the wrong department, have to be transferred, queue for another 5, then get all uppity that they have wasted 15 minutes queueing even though it is THEIR fault.

Was about to post this myself. Getting through to the most basic of advisors is sometimes the worst thing to do. it doesn't make resolution any quicker at all and tbh will leave you feeling more frustrated :p
 
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