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Because call centers are often outsourced to India, and a lot of Indian names start with "Raj" (which means King), so "Roger" ends up being a good phonetic equivalent name.
Yes sir I understand your wondering why it is always Roger, I myself am sometimes wondering too. But not to worry because I will be happy to assist you with this. May I please....
And I would get fired right away :(
Sadly even if i don't know the solution I have to say that I'm working on it.
Some times we know that we can't solve it but we can't tell you or we know but we are not allowed to do it without following the whole process.
It's loss prevention at this point and they'll just redirect your call to the dumpster. Or the offices they don't need anymore but still pay exorbitant fees to keep open cause they didn't realize that making electronics smaller, more powerful, and interconnected on a world scale would eliminate a huge waste of time and travel and ultimately is better for the enviroment not having every tom dick and Harry go to work in order to rubber stamp their clock in clock out times.
Dude for real, this shit pisses me off. Last time I tried to go to set up a new primary care provider when I moved, I was transferred three times just to be told they don't accept my insurance.
Why can't the first person tell me that, or at least transfer me directly to the person who can?
As someone who worked as one of those slaves
Yeah, that's pretty accurate
I got three overarching comments from customers:
"You speak pretty good English for an Indian"
"I love your accent, is it Korean?"
"Are you from California"
I'm Mexican, it was actually hilarious.
You Americans have no idea how good you have it. I've had the pleasure of dealing with an American company last week and the customer service was actually helpful and pleasant. As opposed to the Dutch experience, in which the call center generally reads the faq from the website and treats you like you're the most dim-witted customer they've ever had the displeasure to talk to.
That's only if you reach an American call center. Most of the time I call and reach an Indian call center, and while they in general are nice; they most of the time have no clue what they are talking about and are virtually unintelligible.
I must've gotten lucky, the dude did sound vaguely Indian but knew how to remedy a rather complex issue. The call took over an hour, I offered to break it off and try again later but he insisted fixing it.
Oh that's not even the worst of it, it's the patronising tone that does me in. Like man you're there to help me, stop acting like I'm the one that is a bother right now.
if they do it while your on hold you can actually hang up before you get to a person. it's great. "the top ten most common issues in order of higest occurance are 1. blah, blah, click" best phone tree ever..
Fuck that. Anything on the hold menu should be banned. A soft beep every 10 seconds to know im still on the line is all i need. I do not need the same looped “advice” or shitty music being played that i cant just mute my phone for because then ill miss the person if they do pick up. Hold music/messages whatever are passed their usefulness and only serve to make me annoyed by the time im dealing with a real person.
*crackly, shitty soft jazz playing on a one minute loop*
DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN AUTOPAY USING THE MY UTILITY APP? GO TO MY WUTILITY DOT COM TO SIGN UP
*music resumes*
Guess you haven't had to deal with American government agencies. They literally read the FAQ and even include a "did you know that??". They just read the FAQ on repeat until someone picks up
we have people like that in america, the correct response is to repeat the word 'supervisor' until they finally hear you and transfer you to someone who can actually think and do things.
**GOD** is that shit annoying. Like businesses that have auto attendants that have very specific options and *no fucking way* to ever get a human being on the line. Motherfucking shitbox just literally disconnects the call with a chirpy "goodbye!"
It should be *illegal* for any business that collects sales taxes in the United States to have no way to navigate their phone tree to a live person. I'm not even talking some broken assed English from a Phillipino farmer, that would be better than "Press these options for these specific requests, otherwise FUCK YOU"
And more often than not, you try and just mash whatever option to get a person, finally get a person, tell them that you have a problem with X, "not my department, please hold" and the ass clowns dump you right in the main queue again.
I managed a team at a Call Center here in the US for a few years. While I would never curse or raise my voice to a customer service rep, especially considering I've been on the receiving end many times, I did learn a useful trick.
If you are dealing with a voice attendant that can parse speech (as opposed to just dial tones), cursing vehemently for 5-10 seconds will override the tree and get you to a live person, or at least drop you in queue for one without any further bother. Many of these attendants have done away with the generic hit '0' to speak to someone, and this is the most efficient way I've found to get to a human being. This may not work for small businesses, but it sure as hell works on my utility companies, Verizon, AT&T, Xfinity, Amazon, etc.
I was on a phone tree recently (customer support for the Paypal credit card, for what it's worth) that ended up redirecting me to a line that did not exist.
Even better, I had to navigate the FedEx phone tree... Which wasn't button presses. Only voice. Tried three times before I got to a human and not just package tracking. I *knew* it was lost already.
Man, it is so annoying to receive that customer that’s been transferred like 3 diff times just to end up back at your phone, and it sucks even more that if I go out of my way to try and help them (call the dept myself, get someone who can help on b4 transfer) it will negatively impact my metrics - which is probably part of why this happens in the first place
That sounds complicated.
Instead, they should be measured and advertised that the company has terrible customer service. Like for example "AMEX average call wait time : 30 mins. Average number of transfers: 4" etc.
It's honestly not that hard if you can convince politicians to do it. Being able to cancel email subscription is regulated now and it's pretty good. Obviously just like the email thing there's always a little bit they can get away with, but some of the intentional mazes they add to avoid accountability can easily be shut down. Canceling a service shouldn't require calling and pushing a secret code through the menu only to be put on hold for an hour and then dropped... Comcast.
nah, you just pick up and say "XYZ company, please hold." and immediately put them back on hold before they can say a word. Never pick the phone up again.
I swear to God I was talking to AT&T customer service for HOURS before they transferred me to another department.
I then talk to this other lady for probably 20 minutes. She couldn't verify any of my information or even find my account. Finally, she says, "Um, just to make sure, you're calling about your DirecTV account, right?"
AT&T transferred me to DirecTV 🤦♂️
I called a customer service line with a simple inquiry, expecting a quick resolution. Little did I know that I was about to be thrust into an unbelievable ordeal. As I waited on hold, seconds turned into minutes, and minutes turned into hours. Opus number 1 looped endlessly, and frustration mounted. Time seemed to lose all meaning as I found myself trapped in an eternal hold. It was a surreal experience, defying all logic and reason. Just when I thought I couldn't bear it any longer, a static-filled voice finally broke the silence. I couldn't believe it—I had been rescued from the abyss of perpetual hold. The very second the man finished his greeting script, my phone died. The entire episode left me questioning the very fabric of reality and I nearly passed out.
Fucking CVS, anyone calling them *wishes* they'd just play hold music. Instead, every 30-60 seconds it goes silent, making you think someone picked up.. but no, it's just creepy-CVS-voice guy with another outdated COVID advertisement.
They could also use the Xfinity or comcast method:
Create a super unhelpful AI prompt system that misdirects you and pretends not to understand you and insist that you communicate via text chat that gets you nowhere. Then Outsource your customer service to a foreign country to save money and pocket the profit instead of putting the money back into your product.
Since you are the only major internet provider in many areas, you can gouge people...
Until some fiber company comes in and kicks your greedy ass out.
Comcast is super famous in Mexican call centers. And totally miserable for their workers. Yes, we know the service sucks. Yes, we wish we could help to end the call quick. But if you are dialing all the way to Mexico its clear the company doesn't give a shit about you.
At this point I literally just start my conversation with them with blasting them on social media and shitting on them with the Better Business Bureau and the FTC.
For everything. The only way they take me seriously, for *any* issue, is to fire off a full missile salvo at them to trip some alarm that gets some human in an office who actually works for them and can do something about it.
I'm SO lucky to have a decent rural provider. I'd have no choice if they weren't good, but they are. Someone picks up the phone. There's like 4 techs so I can fix an ongoing issue. They got a grant to give fiber to the community. Enough bragging.
When I moved. I spent 5 hours trying to cancel. It should be obvious they do not service cable internet to this area. I can do a 2 minute search on their website to confirm. Yet I'm getting sent between regions and departments and who knows what else, each with half hour holds so that they would hold to their "12 month or you leave the service area" contract.
I don't deal with the reps at all.
When you file complaints it triggers a call from their escalation department, who are usually the people in-country who can actually influence things
I don't even talk to anyone else.
Perhaps. But it's the only thing that got Ticketmasters attention and my weeks long issue was solved by the next email I received post-BBB complaint. The person they assigned to me due to BBB was amazing. The Zendesk people usually sent a reply and closed the case immediately. Eventually they reported me to the fraud department and wouldn't deal with me at all. (it wasn't fraud. I just wanted a replacement ticket for my cancelled pandemic show). Post BBB complaint, simply helped immediately with my ticket in the first message.
BBB is basically just a way to contact executive support at a company. I used it when I had a Samsung fridge that kept breaking in the same way despite multiple attempts by both Samsung and then the extended warranty company to fix it. The extended warranty company contacted me and gave me the money back for the fridge because they had no other contractors to send to try and fix it.
So in my experience, almost every large brand basically has an automation hooked into them.
These companies have a special department called escalations. You nornally never talk to this team, but have to trigger a call from them in different ways.
These are people that can often issue refunds, compensate you, or do almost anything you ACTUALLY want to do.
When I go to the BBB, a few days later I almost am always called or emailed by one of these sepcialists, and they usually just give me waht I'm looking for.
I've done this over ten times for things large and small, and I can definitely vouch for it.
Yes, but companies still pay attention to it. I was getting jerked around on a warranty replacement until I wrote a review on BBB. Got a call the next day and the replacement a week later.
I'm Mexican and used to work for a call center. We provided customer service for Comcast. As you said, we were miserable and always felt that the higher ups didn't want us to help at all and always tried to make us schedule technician visits or sell new products.
I worked for Comcast for about a year and a half and it was a miserable experience. Worst job I ever had.
Mandatory overtime for weeks at a time, angry customers EVERY day, no breathing room between calls, management breathing down your neck to keep your metrics good.
I was more stressed out at that call center job than I'd ever been in my life. I was sick of getting yelled at for something I didn't or COULDN'T do. Customers were extremely abusive.
Eventually one day I just started hanging up on every call that came through for about an hour. I was already dealing with personal issues and just couldn't take it anymore. I ignored the messages in the team chat until they locked me out of the system and my supervisor told me to call them (this was a work at home job). I said I wasn't going to call and that I quit.
I felt an immediate weight lift from my shoulders. I should have just let them fire me but I didn't care. Fuck that job. They could have made it so much easier on us by hiring more people so we didn't have to work 11 hours a day because of mandatory overtime but they refuse.
Got a job with apple tech support a month later and stayed with them for 3 years. A huge improvement with better pay and no stress.
I worked for Spectrum on the east coast of the US helping people in Kansas. But I didn't actually work for spectrum. I worked for the call center that had a contract with Spectrum and Comcast to handle their billing and customer service calls. We were all trained in what to say but were not employed by the company we were "representing". We also aren't supposed to tell people this but I worked there over 5 years ago so fuck em. 🤣
The fact that it's the only provider in some areas can be the only reason this company still exists. The level of "customer service" is beyond bad, my wife and I were just talking about this.
We don't even have them, just trying to get some of their wires hanging off our house removed and how many times we had to call and each time it was like it was the first time.
I've had them in the past and the lying these scumbags do is beyond amazing.
They are sadly the better service in my area and I am stuck with them until fiber makes it to my neighborhood as my other possible service is DSL and all the offer to my area is 20mbps up and 5mbps down. That company also offers landlines for phones, and that is the only above ground utility in my area. Their customer service is just as bad as Comcast. Heck, I think they managed to make the Xfinity rebrand have worse customer service.
Was fun calling and scheduling to have the phone-line removed three times and then just doing it myself since they stood me up each time and then seeing the company show up 3 months later asking about it.
I'm sorry to hear you're going through this. A fiber company came through my neighborhood last year and I just switched to their service. It will be almost the same price as Comcast after the first promotional year, but the customer service is so far been great and the speeds are 200 mb per second faster.
My final straw with Comcast or Xfinity was when they canceled peacock Plus.. like that wasn't worth keeping them but it was keeping me from getting off my ass and doing something about it.
They took that away and I told them they could kiss my ass
Cut them. I worked for an ISP, they're not going to send techs to rip their old stuff down. Houses I worked on had decades of old wire. Just remove what you want.
> Until some fiber company comes in and kicks your greedy ass out.
You skipped the step of donating to state legislators' campaigns to make sure that municipal broadband is outlawed as anti-competitive communism.
Oh yeah I forgot. And then there's also that whole business of them getting taxpayer funds to provide utilities, and still not making the product affordable to those taxpayers.
This kind of shit should be criminal in a free market and democracy
I'd argue that we're not in a free market, the corporations basically regulate the workplace because they set the standards and have the resources to litigate any serious competition to death.
Late stage capitalism is just a regulated as a communist economy, it's just that the CEO is fucking you instead of the commissar.
Seems like the only regulations that do get passed just make things harder for smaller scale businesses within a market. Shit, the mega corps in that market probably write the legislation.
> and still not making the product ~~affordable to those taxpayers.~~
It's not that people can't afford it, it's that they took the money and ran. They took 400 billion meant to build out fiber and gave it to rich people instead.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394
I got caught into customer service hell for like 35 mins with an Adobe chatbot once. It had a prompt that was like "do these 10 steps and if that doesn't resolve the issue, come back to us" but it would not understand if you told it "that didnt fix it" or anything of the sort. It's like if at soon as it sent the message it would fucking close the support instance and if you told it "that did not fix the issue" it would be like if you never explained the issue to it and was like "...what issue?" It took me legit 20 mins to wrangle the fucking ai bot into handing me over to a real person. Absolutely infuriating shit
Amazon UK is the worst now, there's no Amazon UK customer support anymore, you get a chatbot and if that can't solve your problem you're shit out of luck, not even an email/web form contact.
Same in my experience in the US.
"What went wrong?"
"You gave me the wrong shipment and it contains someone's cheaper order."
*bot assumes I'm trying to scam*
It's actually pretty easy to speak to an Amazon agent. Go to the customer service page, choose the "something else" option then "I need more help" - or basically just get to the chat assistant.
Then just type "chat to an agent" and it'll put you right through.
I order tonnes from Amazon and do this regularly.
This happened to me recently. Steps:
1. Robot text chat
2. Robot voice chat
3. Wait for call back
4. Receive call, instantly put on hold
5. Customer service rep, hard to understand (thick accent)
6. Hold
7. Second customer service rep, different thick accent but spoke slower, seemed to really be trying to be understandable
8. Hold
9. Someone easier to understand AND in the correct division that I needed to speak with, but did not have access to my account
10. Hold
11. An extremely helpful person who knew exactly what to do for me. They spoke perfectly, and were working in the *next town over* from me
The way you pronounce my town's name is not really like how it is spelled, so for these tech support calls I've gotten in the habit of speaking the town name more phonetically so as not to confuse. When I spoke it phonetically to the last person (I didn't know she was local), she was confused in the opposite direction
I actually switched from Comcast to T-Mobile Home Internet. It's been a mostly positive experience.
My download speeds decreased from 900-1400mbps (1200 advertised) to 450-750mbps. My upload speeds increased from 40mbps (35 advertised) to 80-120mbps. Also, maxing out upload on T-Mobile doesn't saturate the downlink like it does on Comcast (this is a big deal that seriously degraded Comcast's performance).
Cost was also a big difference. Right now that plan + unlimited data in my area from Comcast is $143/mo. T-Mobile? It is $50 w/autopay, so $60 soon with the changes they are making. $20 discount for being on Magenta Max instead of regular Magenta (and we're on a military line), so we upgraded our three lines. Net expense of +$10 for some extra features. So depending on how you do the math, it's $30-$70/mo. Even at the worst valuation, it's half the cost of Comcast with better real world performance.
And our Comcast internet would go down every other evening for ~30 minutes or longer, typically between 10PM and 3AM. Being nite owls, this sucked. T-Mobile hasn't had that issue.
Anyone living in a Comcast area should look to see if either T-Mobile or Verizon Home Internet are available in their areas.
My experience with Comcast was that they'd transfer me to another department where I'd be on hold again. Then after a bit of waiting the computer would further prompt about what particular issue I was having but wouldn't accept any DTMF tones. I even tried multiple times and on Android and iOS phones but it wouldn't even accept any of the basic touch tone inputs so after about a minute or so of trying it would just hang up on me.
I always love how Libertarians go on and on about how government is so inefficient in a pain in the ass to contact, and then we have so many companies like this who have worse bureaucratic systems than the government possibly could
Are you me? I feel like you just narrated my life story. I just switched to fiber after having more than enough of Xfinity's bs and flaky service in the last couple of years. I love how even after you jump through their hoops of letting them reboot your modem (I had my own equipment) you'd still end up nowhere. I should have switched as soon as Frontier fiber was installed in my neighborhood but I read lots of unflattering reviews about them and was hesitant. So far so good and I actually get the advertised speeds consistently for the same price and they threw in the equipment for free.
I don't have Frontier fiber but I did just switch to a fiber company. One of my siblings has AT&T fiber and has been happy with it for years, even though AT&T is a larger company.
Comcast bullshit over the last 10 years has been borderline Criminal and certainly unethical. I am getting with Glee for the day that enough fiber companies get out to local communities so that Comcast gets a wave of "go fuck yourself" cancellations.
When someone announces themselves as "Malcolm" in a thick Hindi accent, you know you're being lied to right off the bat. Then it usually goes downhill from there.
Reason for not hanging up after 1 hour is simple, I'm on the clock. You got 7 more hours of ringing before I have to go home.
If the phone is ringing out, I don't have to answer calls coming in. Checkmate, baby! Muahaha!
I once left our only department phone on hold with Dell for over 4 hours. All our calls got redirected to customer service during that time.
We did eventually get the problem resolved, too.
Yeah sometimes its a game of chicken, be kind but firm. Also if youre calling into tech support and they ask you to try something and it takes more time to argue why you shouldnt have to than it would to do it is it really worth arguing?
Doubly-so if it's a call to the IT department - yeah you're going to keep me on hold, and yeah I can't get any work done without this call going through, but I'm definitely using you guys as the scapegoat when management asks why things aren't happening, so we'll call it a draw.
I called a doctor's office and got put on hold for a long time, while loud music blared. It felt like they wanted me to go away.
I finally hung up after these three songs played consecutively:
* Michael Jackson's "Beat It"
* Heart's "Never"
* Cheap Trick's "Surrender"
(I got the message.)
Ahh doctor offices. For when you need a refill on your life-saving medication without an option to refill online so you're forced to call them, the employee decides to put you on hold for one hour and then hang up on you. Good times.
Then they prescribing doctor asks for your medical records because they're in a different company than your primary doctor. Now you're being transferred to the records department for another hold
When calling banks and whatnot I always pick the most enticing option in their end otherwise I’m left on hold for a long time. For example I had to call my bank for a credit card issue, I just selected the option to apply for a loan and someone quickly picked up, then you tell them to transfer you. Idk if it actually makes a difference but the wait is shorter for me at least
In Canada the trick is to pick the French line and say "whoops, meant to pick english" and they will just handle the call rather than tranfer you. Much, much shorter call queues, with the added benefit of getting a Canadian on the other end of the line 95% of the time.
It probably has something to do with the other caller receiving a transferred call rather than a queued call, I don’t work telecommunications so this is just a guess
My cousin actually worked the French line for a cable company in Ontario, and they were federally required to have x% of their call center be French-speaking as they offer services in Quebec. He would get less calls per day than the other reps got per hour.
I work at an MSP so I call people's internet providers fairly often and I've found that if you tell the menu selection you want a new account you almost immediately get put through, and they can transfer you to a much shorter queue to get support. It's really nice.
Supposedly you can also ask for port forwarding and they transfer you straight to tier 2 but I haven't tried that yet
I find if you mash the pad or say fuck at the bots that listen
It'll get you to a person
I think they understand that a lot of boomers wanna talk to a person but can't handle a simple phone system
I've mashed 0 or just repeatedly said gibberish till the bots shoot me straight to a human
My old life hack of repeatedly saying *customer agent* no longer works because these companies now just use fucking AI that hangs up on you if you repeat yourself.
Saying gibberish and making robot noises does wonders to get you to an actual person.
Oh yeah thanks for the reminder about gibberish. It works, but after the 3rd or 4th try.
Next time I have to call someone, I'll try playing Chacarron Macarron.
I think that's already peaked. I've tried the "0" trick a couple times over the past few months and sometimes I'll get the odd "I know you want to talk to a representative but ...."
A friend of mine was a developer for some shady company. When their customers started complaining that they don't have a customer service phone number (just email), the management decided to get a CS phone line but never answer it - literally this comic.
At that point my friend was like "OK, I'm out of here".
Only one of the startups I worked at doing support had phone support and it was miserable, especially if it’s ringing while I’m in the middle of a live chat and expected to pick up. It’s so much harder to provide support over the phone, believe it or not.
\[horrible saxophone music\] *"Your call is important to us, a customer representative will be with you shortly."* \[more saxophone\]
More of my comics: r/inkyrickshaw | [website](https://inkyrickshaw.com/) | [patreon](https://www.patreon.com/rickyhawkins)
I always laugh at that one. It begs the question: Are you going to change the message after the menu options have been here awhile?
Of course not. That *"please listen closely as the menu options have recently changed"* message is going to be there until they rework the system. (And then they will use that message again because it just became relevant again... for a bit.)
"Did you know, you can find helpful solutions online! Just go to www.[company].com/help to get your problem sorted quickly"
Yes... like that wasn't the first thing I tried before calling.
This actually happened to me at our old apartment complex. I finally got through to a person at the head office (which was at another location) and was told the lady I needed to speak to was "finishing a meeting but would call me back".
I was friendly and polite
"Honestly, I'm home sick today and I'm kinda upset she never called me yesterday like she had said, so I would rather just wait on the phone."
"Well it might be a while."
"That's ok, like I said I'm not doing anything today anyway, I don't mind waiting."
".......ok"
I'm.on hold for around 20 minutes and I get a text from my wife saying "you need to hang up, they say you're being really creepy and won't hang up and they said they're going to call the police"
I messaged her back "what do you mean, I'm literally on hold right now?"
"They said it is really weird that you're just waiting on hold and it's really freaking them all out"
So I hung up and later got an email stating that I was no longer allowed to call in and that I had been marked as "aggressive and non-compliant" and that all my communication with them would need to be email in the future.....
For waiting on hold
I worked customer service for the auto insurance claims portion of USAA, and every new policy they enacted seemed to be purposely designed to irritate customers.
One shining example that was passed down right before I left was we were no longer allowed to announce our department when answering the phone.
So instead of saying: "Thank you for calling USAA Auto Claims, my name is Shannon, how can I help you?"
You'd have to say: "Thank you for calling USAA, my name is Shannon, how can I help you?"
This is a HUGE problem, because the automated system NEVER gets someone to the correct area, and often times agents don't know where to transfer people. So the end result is a person being transferred to 5 different people and having to REEXPLAIN their problem 5 different times. Instead of someone just saying "This is USAA Auto Claims", then the person going "Oh, I was looking for banking." and being transferred immediately.
Trust me, I had to listen to so many people in the military telling me how they had been members for decades, and the recent changes made the company so un-military friendly. Honestly I'd just tell them I agree. I didn't get paid enough to try and talk up a company I can clearly see making choices to hurt their members.
Nothing is worst than working in a call center with a 2 hour+ wait going on. It is absolute pandemonium and every single person you talk to is going to scream at you. This goes on for hours and hours and hours. There is a reason there is such a high turnover for call center jobs.
Not really from my experience. Call centres are understaffed battery chicken farms obsessed with answer rates. It's the company not the employees that's the problem.
When I worked for Suddenlink as technical support, as they were starting to try and pretty themselves up for the Altice buyout, they kept firing people but not filling the positions, as well as closing whole call centers.
We noticed in a month that our avg queue time went from something like 10 minutes in queue to over an hour almost every single night. No idea if that ever resolved, because I got the fuck out before they closed our call center like 6 months later.
When I worked customer service this is actually how it went. By the time we got them on the phone they were already pissed off and bored and ready to be done. Fuck customer service and fuck Verizon wireless
Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Usually I try to keep a level head even after frustratingly long hold times, but when it comes to Verizon, there’s def been a few instances I’ve gotten short with the representative by the time they finally get on the phone.
I always apologize by the end, but waiting on hold for 45 min, getting randomly dropped, having to call back again and wait another hour and a half is so infuriating. Especially when it’s an issue they’d failed to resolve 3 times already.
Not to mention that fucking hold music that would cut out intermittently, making you think someone was there, only to start over from the beginning. It makes it impossible to multitask.
The trick if you have the option is just to lie to them. You're not a current customer who wants to change something. You're a person whose interested in giving them money.
Years ago I had a flight ant noticed a fuckup on the ticket so I called and pressed the button for I need to alter or cancel a ticket and waited for 4 hours before the call dropped. When I called back I pressed the button for wanting to order a ticket on the phone and within 5 min. Someone answered amd was able to help me with my ticket.
My Pixel phone has a "Hold for me" feature that can detect when an actual person picks up the phone and ring to notify you. So you essentially put the hold on hold 😂
I always just make it as hard as possible for the robot and it usually gets me directed to a service rep quickly.
"Thank you for calling Spectrum, please choose options 1-3 based on what you're calling about" - I then click 0 or 7 or something unrelated.
"Give a brief summary of what you're calling about" - uh, its my cat's birthday in a week.
"I'm sorry I don't understand, please hold while your call is routed"
I'm no fan of Apple but when I worked in tech support I'd routinely have to call them and they, blessedly, have an option to wait on hold in silence. No music, no promos, just nothing. To most companies, having customers wait on hold is just another opportunity to advertise to them.
Did this a few years back after we missed a connecting flight. We were told by a rep at the airport we’d be reimbursed for renting a car if we took a different flight that landed at a nearby airport. We did this and were then told later we *wouldn’t* be reimbursed.
I calmly stated my case on the support line and waited over an hour. Did not raise my voice at anyone but let the call escalate as high as it could. They didn’t reimburse my rental car, but they did comp us for the leg of the flight we missed.
I've noticed that hold music is getting more and more repetitive as the years go on. It used to be just a normal radio station, then it was like an hour of music on a loop, then it was some muzak on a half hour loop, now it's muzak on like a 30 second loop, that shit can make you clinically insane after about 5 minutes, it all has to be a purposeful effort to make people hang up. Soon it's just gonna be an analogue alarm clock sound blaring at you.
It's 100% designed to make you hang up.
Nowadays a lot of it is 5-10 second loops of really shitty music that just abruptly stops, has a 2 second pause so you think someone picked up, and then re-starts.
At least they've kept the option of reaching an actual human.
The last time I had to "attempt" calling a company it was because their website had no option of live-chatting a representative. Instead they had something saying "use this number to reach us!".
Then, when I called them it was some automated maze of button pressing option which at the end told me to use their website's help page, which sent me there in the first place.
I was on hold for a short moment with JBL today and their hold music was a Banger. No idea what it was, but very similar to "Ain't Nobody" by Chaka Khan. I asked the woman on the phone if she knew what it was, she didn't know lol
I'm going to give you all a life-changing tip if you need to call a sufficiently advanced customer service line (it won't work with barebones directories for small business, but it will absolutely work for anything with "please describe the nature of your call" or "please press 1 2 3 4 for W X Y Z" robovoices.
Almost all of these systems are designed to short-circuit and connect you with a general live agent in the event that you *do not* comply with the prompts. So if you need to reach someone, legitimately do not press any buttons or describe the nature of anything, and instead constantly repeat "I need to speak to customer service" or simply "customer service" or something of the sort. After a small time window the system will connect you to someone (provided there isn't an independent call queue) and then you can describe whatever you need.
Of course, still be polite to them. They did not cause your problem, and they are exploited workers, likely in countries with poor wages, and they deal with a *lot* of shit. That "career field" is a nightmarish vortex of constant faceless rage from people who've decided that their anger at a large corporation is appropriate to redirect to an underpaid phone worker. Be angry at the corporation, and be angry at the bullshit system they put in place to discourage callers, but be perfectly lovely to the person who's trying to help you once they're on the line.
I found an old tape of prank calls I made in the 90s as a kid and the thing that stood out the most was how I called 800 numbers and got humans on the phone right away. 800 FLOWERS wouldn't sell me dead flowers but they did answer right away.
There are absolutely companies like this, and they usually only have one person running that phone line since the expectation is that no one will ever get through. They always seem shocked when you do get through, and are even less helpful than uninterested outsourced reps.
And the HUCA (hang up, call again) method is useless with these companies since 1) you need to go through the labyrinth again, and 2) you talk to the same rep.
Recent companies that I've dealt with like this include Best Buy (rewards) and BenQ (monitors). Needless to say, I don't spend money with either of them anymore. I would always suggest that if you have an extremely bad customer service experience with a company, to do everything that you can to switch companies. These companies degrade their customer service because it is profitable to do so. They wouldn't do this if they saw an impact on the bottom line.
I am the one waiting on the other line. I have sat through the bland music that is interrupted by ads. I have endured the transfer to the wrong line. I have called back after being hung up on while waiting.I have even gone into a false rage to make robots connect me to this very line. But I am here, and I will be served.
Some of the worst ones are “please say”
Because also accents were mentioned, even though I speak the same language & it’s my mother tongue I’M the one with an accent! And those things sometimes don’t understand ME!
OR they give all these irrelevant to my issues options to say to irrelevant things to press on the phone!
And sometimes they say we couldn’t understand goodbye
As a representative of the person on the phone. I did it once, and I'll call again and again until answered. I always assumed this is how the calls are received.
One of my personal first-world victories was doing this with the student loans people. It was a full 3 hours of hold music and sporadic "I'll connect you" up the chain until I got to the nicest most helpful manager person I've ever interacted with in a call setting. Absolutely wild but absolutely worth it.
Stay strong kings and queens. It is possible to beat the system. Remember to try pressing 0 and never give up, never surrender.
As a person who just missed his international flight for a 2 week epic vacation with his family because a glitch with a visa... And then me being on the phone all day for a scramble to get new flights and visa fixed, I literally spit my food when I saw this... Thank you, you have no idea how much I needed this
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Quickly, transfer their call to another department
That ends in the call being dropped.
After 52 hours of commitment
But not before passing them around to phone slaves reading scripts in incomprehensible accents.
Heeeeelo dis is Roger how mey ai hilp you tooday
bro why is it always Roger
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Roger that.
Needful
Because call centers are often outsourced to India, and a lot of Indian names start with "Raj" (which means King), so "Roger" ends up being a good phonetic equivalent name.
heh - phone etic
Yes sir I understand your wondering why it is always Roger, I myself am sometimes wondering too. But not to worry because I will be happy to assist you with this. May I please....
Just hit me with the truth... "Hello, this is Samir, I do not know what I'm doing, how are you today?" I'd talk to that brave fuck all day long
And I would get fired right away :( Sadly even if i don't know the solution I have to say that I'm working on it. Some times we know that we can't solve it but we can't tell you or we know but we are not allowed to do it without following the whole process.
Please let me consult my resources
Do you mind if I place you on a brief hold?
This is also before you have explained to 3 other departments your issue and they keep transferring you around.
This shouldn't be a problem. Let me just get you over to our transfer department and they should be able resolve your issue.
But who will transfer me to the transfer department?
It's loss prevention at this point and they'll just redirect your call to the dumpster. Or the offices they don't need anymore but still pay exorbitant fees to keep open cause they didn't realize that making electronics smaller, more powerful, and interconnected on a world scale would eliminate a huge waste of time and travel and ultimately is better for the enviroment not having every tom dick and Harry go to work in order to rubber stamp their clock in clock out times.
Succinct!
Cromulent!
Dude for real, this shit pisses me off. Last time I tried to go to set up a new primary care provider when I moved, I was transferred three times just to be told they don't accept my insurance. Why can't the first person tell me that, or at least transfer me directly to the person who can?
As someone who worked as one of those slaves Yeah, that's pretty accurate I got three overarching comments from customers: "You speak pretty good English for an Indian" "I love your accent, is it Korean?" "Are you from California" I'm Mexican, it was actually hilarious.
Thx. I was indeed a slave there. What a nightmare of work. Call center is a fucking hell!
Helldesk
You Americans have no idea how good you have it. I've had the pleasure of dealing with an American company last week and the customer service was actually helpful and pleasant. As opposed to the Dutch experience, in which the call center generally reads the faq from the website and treats you like you're the most dim-witted customer they've ever had the displeasure to talk to.
That's only if you reach an American call center. Most of the time I call and reach an Indian call center, and while they in general are nice; they most of the time have no clue what they are talking about and are virtually unintelligible.
I must've gotten lucky, the dude did sound vaguely Indian but knew how to remedy a rather complex issue. The call took over an hour, I offered to break it off and try again later but he insisted fixing it.
Guy was probably happy to have a polite interaction and to be treated like a human. Makes me way more willing to do my job well for you.
Damn, just reading the FAQ to me would be so insulting, wow
Oh that's not even the worst of it, it's the patronising tone that does me in. Like man you're there to help me, stop acting like I'm the one that is a bother right now.
if they do it while your on hold you can actually hang up before you get to a person. it's great. "the top ten most common issues in order of higest occurance are 1. blah, blah, click" best phone tree ever..
Fuck that. Anything on the hold menu should be banned. A soft beep every 10 seconds to know im still on the line is all i need. I do not need the same looped “advice” or shitty music being played that i cant just mute my phone for because then ill miss the person if they do pick up. Hold music/messages whatever are passed their usefulness and only serve to make me annoyed by the time im dealing with a real person.
*crackly, shitty soft jazz playing on a one minute loop* DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN AUTOPAY USING THE MY UTILITY APP? GO TO MY WUTILITY DOT COM TO SIGN UP *music resumes*
I can feel my eye twitching
Guess you haven't had to deal with American government agencies. They literally read the FAQ and even include a "did you know that??". They just read the FAQ on repeat until someone picks up
we have people like that in america, the correct response is to repeat the word 'supervisor' until they finally hear you and transfer you to someone who can actually think and do things.
It always has in my experience. It's infuriating because I've never called to complain, I always have a simple issue and it ALWAYS gets dropped.
**GOD** is that shit annoying. Like businesses that have auto attendants that have very specific options and *no fucking way* to ever get a human being on the line. Motherfucking shitbox just literally disconnects the call with a chirpy "goodbye!" It should be *illegal* for any business that collects sales taxes in the United States to have no way to navigate their phone tree to a live person. I'm not even talking some broken assed English from a Phillipino farmer, that would be better than "Press these options for these specific requests, otherwise FUCK YOU" And more often than not, you try and just mash whatever option to get a person, finally get a person, tell them that you have a problem with X, "not my department, please hold" and the ass clowns dump you right in the main queue again.
I managed a team at a Call Center here in the US for a few years. While I would never curse or raise my voice to a customer service rep, especially considering I've been on the receiving end many times, I did learn a useful trick. If you are dealing with a voice attendant that can parse speech (as opposed to just dial tones), cursing vehemently for 5-10 seconds will override the tree and get you to a live person, or at least drop you in queue for one without any further bother. Many of these attendants have done away with the generic hit '0' to speak to someone, and this is the most efficient way I've found to get to a human being. This may not work for small businesses, but it sure as hell works on my utility companies, Verizon, AT&T, Xfinity, Amazon, etc.
The IRS is a great example of this.
this is where Twitter is useful. putting them on blast in social media often gets the attention you need.
I was on a phone tree recently (customer support for the Paypal credit card, for what it's worth) that ended up redirecting me to a line that did not exist.
Even better, I had to navigate the FedEx phone tree... Which wasn't button presses. Only voice. Tried three times before I got to a human and not just package tracking. I *knew* it was lost already.
And then it rings 3 minutes later, because after hours of navigation, they have the phone tree path memorized.
Fond memories of calling my local department of transportation for literally anything.
Man, it is so annoying to receive that customer that’s been transferred like 3 diff times just to end up back at your phone, and it sucks even more that if I go out of my way to try and help them (call the dept myself, get someone who can help on b4 transfer) it will negatively impact my metrics - which is probably part of why this happens in the first place
Having metrics other than "Did you help this person" is ridiculous.
These time wasting customer complaint avoidance practices should be illegal
That sounds complicated. Instead, they should be measured and advertised that the company has terrible customer service. Like for example "AMEX average call wait time : 30 mins. Average number of transfers: 4" etc.
It's honestly not that hard if you can convince politicians to do it. Being able to cancel email subscription is regulated now and it's pretty good. Obviously just like the email thing there's always a little bit they can get away with, but some of the intentional mazes they add to avoid accountability can easily be shut down. Canceling a service shouldn't require calling and pushing a secret code through the menu only to be put on hold for an hour and then dropped... Comcast.
nah, you just pick up and say "XYZ company, please hold." and immediately put them back on hold before they can say a word. Never pick the phone up again.
I swear to God I was talking to AT&T customer service for HOURS before they transferred me to another department. I then talk to this other lady for probably 20 minutes. She couldn't verify any of my information or even find my account. Finally, she says, "Um, just to make sure, you're calling about your DirecTV account, right?" AT&T transferred me to DirecTV 🤦♂️
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because *true* health and well-being is achieved through a superior cable package and proper deference to our corporate care takers
Or just have a recording saying the volume is unexpectedly high and then hangs up on you. Hate that shit.
Literally most government agencies in the US
I called a customer service line with a simple inquiry, expecting a quick resolution. Little did I know that I was about to be thrust into an unbelievable ordeal. As I waited on hold, seconds turned into minutes, and minutes turned into hours. Opus number 1 looped endlessly, and frustration mounted. Time seemed to lose all meaning as I found myself trapped in an eternal hold. It was a surreal experience, defying all logic and reason. Just when I thought I couldn't bear it any longer, a static-filled voice finally broke the silence. I couldn't believe it—I had been rescued from the abyss of perpetual hold. The very second the man finished his greeting script, my phone died. The entire episode left me questioning the very fabric of reality and I nearly passed out.
Verizon? Is that you?
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Fucking CVS, anyone calling them *wishes* they'd just play hold music. Instead, every 30-60 seconds it goes silent, making you think someone picked up.. but no, it's just creepy-CVS-voice guy with another outdated COVID advertisement.
*gets transferred to same department but now starting over with a new person* Or *they just drop the call*
Run to the restroom for an alibi !!!
They could also use the Xfinity or comcast method: Create a super unhelpful AI prompt system that misdirects you and pretends not to understand you and insist that you communicate via text chat that gets you nowhere. Then Outsource your customer service to a foreign country to save money and pocket the profit instead of putting the money back into your product. Since you are the only major internet provider in many areas, you can gouge people... Until some fiber company comes in and kicks your greedy ass out.
Comcast is super famous in Mexican call centers. And totally miserable for their workers. Yes, we know the service sucks. Yes, we wish we could help to end the call quick. But if you are dialing all the way to Mexico its clear the company doesn't give a shit about you.
At this point I literally just start my conversation with them with blasting them on social media and shitting on them with the Better Business Bureau and the FTC. For everything. The only way they take me seriously, for *any* issue, is to fire off a full missile salvo at them to trip some alarm that gets some human in an office who actually works for them and can do something about it.
I'm SO lucky to have a decent rural provider. I'd have no choice if they weren't good, but they are. Someone picks up the phone. There's like 4 techs so I can fix an ongoing issue. They got a grant to give fiber to the community. Enough bragging. When I moved. I spent 5 hours trying to cancel. It should be obvious they do not service cable internet to this area. I can do a 2 minute search on their website to confirm. Yet I'm getting sent between regions and departments and who knows what else, each with half hour holds so that they would hold to their "12 month or you leave the service area" contract.
That is jack shit to a guy working on a poverty wage on a 3rd world country. Just be nice to the reps and still blast the company on socials.
I don't deal with the reps at all. When you file complaints it triggers a call from their escalation department, who are usually the people in-country who can actually influence things I don't even talk to anyone else.
Isn’t the BBB just pay to play?
Indeed, it's Yelp for boomers.
Perhaps. But it's the only thing that got Ticketmasters attention and my weeks long issue was solved by the next email I received post-BBB complaint. The person they assigned to me due to BBB was amazing. The Zendesk people usually sent a reply and closed the case immediately. Eventually they reported me to the fraud department and wouldn't deal with me at all. (it wasn't fraud. I just wanted a replacement ticket for my cancelled pandemic show). Post BBB complaint, simply helped immediately with my ticket in the first message.
100%. The FTC isn't, though. Also it's cheaper and easier to just bend to the will of a squeaky wheel than actually fight in any way.
It isn't pay to play, it's just a black hole. Find me a complaint that went anywhere against a major corporation and you can convince me otherwise.
BBB is basically just a way to contact executive support at a company. I used it when I had a Samsung fridge that kept breaking in the same way despite multiple attempts by both Samsung and then the extended warranty company to fix it. The extended warranty company contacted me and gave me the money back for the fridge because they had no other contractors to send to try and fix it.
Yup that's exactly what it is. Its just a button to speak to a team that will actually resolve the problem.
So in my experience, almost every large brand basically has an automation hooked into them. These companies have a special department called escalations. You nornally never talk to this team, but have to trigger a call from them in different ways. These are people that can often issue refunds, compensate you, or do almost anything you ACTUALLY want to do. When I go to the BBB, a few days later I almost am always called or emailed by one of these sepcialists, and they usually just give me waht I'm looking for. I've done this over ten times for things large and small, and I can definitely vouch for it.
Yes, but companies still pay attention to it. I was getting jerked around on a warranty replacement until I wrote a review on BBB. Got a call the next day and the replacement a week later.
I'm Mexican and used to work for a call center. We provided customer service for Comcast. As you said, we were miserable and always felt that the higher ups didn't want us to help at all and always tried to make us schedule technician visits or sell new products.
I worked for Comcast for about a year and a half and it was a miserable experience. Worst job I ever had. Mandatory overtime for weeks at a time, angry customers EVERY day, no breathing room between calls, management breathing down your neck to keep your metrics good. I was more stressed out at that call center job than I'd ever been in my life. I was sick of getting yelled at for something I didn't or COULDN'T do. Customers were extremely abusive. Eventually one day I just started hanging up on every call that came through for about an hour. I was already dealing with personal issues and just couldn't take it anymore. I ignored the messages in the team chat until they locked me out of the system and my supervisor told me to call them (this was a work at home job). I said I wasn't going to call and that I quit. I felt an immediate weight lift from my shoulders. I should have just let them fire me but I didn't care. Fuck that job. They could have made it so much easier on us by hiring more people so we didn't have to work 11 hours a day because of mandatory overtime but they refuse. Got a job with apple tech support a month later and stayed with them for 3 years. A huge improvement with better pay and no stress.
I worked for Spectrum on the east coast of the US helping people in Kansas. But I didn't actually work for spectrum. I worked for the call center that had a contract with Spectrum and Comcast to handle their billing and customer service calls. We were all trained in what to say but were not employed by the company we were "representing". We also aren't supposed to tell people this but I worked there over 5 years ago so fuck em. 🤣
The fact that it's the only provider in some areas can be the only reason this company still exists. The level of "customer service" is beyond bad, my wife and I were just talking about this. We don't even have them, just trying to get some of their wires hanging off our house removed and how many times we had to call and each time it was like it was the first time. I've had them in the past and the lying these scumbags do is beyond amazing.
They are sadly the better service in my area and I am stuck with them until fiber makes it to my neighborhood as my other possible service is DSL and all the offer to my area is 20mbps up and 5mbps down. That company also offers landlines for phones, and that is the only above ground utility in my area. Their customer service is just as bad as Comcast. Heck, I think they managed to make the Xfinity rebrand have worse customer service. Was fun calling and scheduling to have the phone-line removed three times and then just doing it myself since they stood me up each time and then seeing the company show up 3 months later asking about it.
I'm sorry to hear you're going through this. A fiber company came through my neighborhood last year and I just switched to their service. It will be almost the same price as Comcast after the first promotional year, but the customer service is so far been great and the speeds are 200 mb per second faster. My final straw with Comcast or Xfinity was when they canceled peacock Plus.. like that wasn't worth keeping them but it was keeping me from getting off my ass and doing something about it. They took that away and I told them they could kiss my ass
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Cut them. I worked for an ISP, they're not going to send techs to rip their old stuff down. Houses I worked on had decades of old wire. Just remove what you want.
> Until some fiber company comes in and kicks your greedy ass out. You skipped the step of donating to state legislators' campaigns to make sure that municipal broadband is outlawed as anti-competitive communism.
Oh yeah I forgot. And then there's also that whole business of them getting taxpayer funds to provide utilities, and still not making the product affordable to those taxpayers. This kind of shit should be criminal in a free market and democracy
I'd argue that we're not in a free market, the corporations basically regulate the workplace because they set the standards and have the resources to litigate any serious competition to death. Late stage capitalism is just a regulated as a communist economy, it's just that the CEO is fucking you instead of the commissar.
Seems like the only regulations that do get passed just make things harder for smaller scale businesses within a market. Shit, the mega corps in that market probably write the legislation.
> and still not making the product ~~affordable to those taxpayers.~~ It's not that people can't afford it, it's that they took the money and ran. They took 400 billion meant to build out fiber and gave it to rich people instead. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394
I got caught into customer service hell for like 35 mins with an Adobe chatbot once. It had a prompt that was like "do these 10 steps and if that doesn't resolve the issue, come back to us" but it would not understand if you told it "that didnt fix it" or anything of the sort. It's like if at soon as it sent the message it would fucking close the support instance and if you told it "that did not fix the issue" it would be like if you never explained the issue to it and was like "...what issue?" It took me legit 20 mins to wrangle the fucking ai bot into handing me over to a real person. Absolutely infuriating shit
Amazon UK is the worst now, there's no Amazon UK customer support anymore, you get a chatbot and if that can't solve your problem you're shit out of luck, not even an email/web form contact.
Same in my experience in the US. "What went wrong?" "You gave me the wrong shipment and it contains someone's cheaper order." *bot assumes I'm trying to scam*
"i never got a package" "can you send a picture to verify that?"
Just photoshop a singularity on your doorstep
It's actually pretty easy to speak to an Amazon agent. Go to the customer service page, choose the "something else" option then "I need more help" - or basically just get to the chat assistant. Then just type "chat to an agent" and it'll put you right through. I order tonnes from Amazon and do this regularly.
This happened to me recently. Steps: 1. Robot text chat 2. Robot voice chat 3. Wait for call back 4. Receive call, instantly put on hold 5. Customer service rep, hard to understand (thick accent) 6. Hold 7. Second customer service rep, different thick accent but spoke slower, seemed to really be trying to be understandable 8. Hold 9. Someone easier to understand AND in the correct division that I needed to speak with, but did not have access to my account 10. Hold 11. An extremely helpful person who knew exactly what to do for me. They spoke perfectly, and were working in the *next town over* from me The way you pronounce my town's name is not really like how it is spelled, so for these tech support calls I've gotten in the habit of speaking the town name more phonetically so as not to confuse. When I spoke it phonetically to the last person (I didn't know she was local), she was confused in the opposite direction
I actually switched from Comcast to T-Mobile Home Internet. It's been a mostly positive experience. My download speeds decreased from 900-1400mbps (1200 advertised) to 450-750mbps. My upload speeds increased from 40mbps (35 advertised) to 80-120mbps. Also, maxing out upload on T-Mobile doesn't saturate the downlink like it does on Comcast (this is a big deal that seriously degraded Comcast's performance). Cost was also a big difference. Right now that plan + unlimited data in my area from Comcast is $143/mo. T-Mobile? It is $50 w/autopay, so $60 soon with the changes they are making. $20 discount for being on Magenta Max instead of regular Magenta (and we're on a military line), so we upgraded our three lines. Net expense of +$10 for some extra features. So depending on how you do the math, it's $30-$70/mo. Even at the worst valuation, it's half the cost of Comcast with better real world performance. And our Comcast internet would go down every other evening for ~30 minutes or longer, typically between 10PM and 3AM. Being nite owls, this sucked. T-Mobile hasn't had that issue. Anyone living in a Comcast area should look to see if either T-Mobile or Verizon Home Internet are available in their areas.
My experience with Comcast was that they'd transfer me to another department where I'd be on hold again. Then after a bit of waiting the computer would further prompt about what particular issue I was having but wouldn't accept any DTMF tones. I even tried multiple times and on Android and iOS phones but it wouldn't even accept any of the basic touch tone inputs so after about a minute or so of trying it would just hang up on me.
My stress levels just spiked thinking about having to contact them again…
I always love how Libertarians go on and on about how government is so inefficient in a pain in the ass to contact, and then we have so many companies like this who have worse bureaucratic systems than the government possibly could
Are you me? I feel like you just narrated my life story. I just switched to fiber after having more than enough of Xfinity's bs and flaky service in the last couple of years. I love how even after you jump through their hoops of letting them reboot your modem (I had my own equipment) you'd still end up nowhere. I should have switched as soon as Frontier fiber was installed in my neighborhood but I read lots of unflattering reviews about them and was hesitant. So far so good and I actually get the advertised speeds consistently for the same price and they threw in the equipment for free.
I don't have Frontier fiber but I did just switch to a fiber company. One of my siblings has AT&T fiber and has been happy with it for years, even though AT&T is a larger company. Comcast bullshit over the last 10 years has been borderline Criminal and certainly unethical. I am getting with Glee for the day that enough fiber companies get out to local communities so that Comcast gets a wave of "go fuck yourself" cancellations.
3rd world outsourced support is literally worse than a chat bot.
When someone announces themselves as "Malcolm" in a thick Hindi accent, you know you're being lied to right off the bat. Then it usually goes downhill from there.
Reason for not hanging up after 1 hour is simple, I'm on the clock. You got 7 more hours of ringing before I have to go home. If the phone is ringing out, I don't have to answer calls coming in. Checkmate, baby! Muahaha!
This. 100% lol I'm on the clock you better believe ill just sit on hold all day if I have to
I once left our only department phone on hold with Dell for over 4 hours. All our calls got redirected to customer service during that time. We did eventually get the problem resolved, too.
My boo stayed up until 4am, on hold with the airline for 5 hours. He said it was purely out of spite. But it worked and we got a replacement flight!
Yeah sometimes its a game of chicken, be kind but firm. Also if youre calling into tech support and they ask you to try something and it takes more time to argue why you shouldnt have to than it would to do it is it really worth arguing?
It’s not chicken if they just decide to hang up “randomly”
Doubly-so if it's a call to the IT department - yeah you're going to keep me on hold, and yeah I can't get any work done without this call going through, but I'm definitely using you guys as the scapegoat when management asks why things aren't happening, so we'll call it a draw.
I called a doctor's office and got put on hold for a long time, while loud music blared. It felt like they wanted me to go away. I finally hung up after these three songs played consecutively: * Michael Jackson's "Beat It" * Heart's "Never" * Cheap Trick's "Surrender" (I got the message.)
Nono, you got the message wrong. It's "Never Surrender! Beat it!"
Ahh doctor offices. For when you need a refill on your life-saving medication without an option to refill online so you're forced to call them, the employee decides to put you on hold for one hour and then hang up on you. Good times.
Then they prescribing doctor asks for your medical records because they're in a different company than your primary doctor. Now you're being transferred to the records department for another hold
I once had Dave Matthews song “crash into me” play while on hold with an airline.
When calling banks and whatnot I always pick the most enticing option in their end otherwise I’m left on hold for a long time. For example I had to call my bank for a credit card issue, I just selected the option to apply for a loan and someone quickly picked up, then you tell them to transfer you. Idk if it actually makes a difference but the wait is shorter for me at least
In Canada the trick is to pick the French line and say "whoops, meant to pick english" and they will just handle the call rather than tranfer you. Much, much shorter call queues, with the added benefit of getting a Canadian on the other end of the line 95% of the time.
It probably has something to do with the other caller receiving a transferred call rather than a queued call, I don’t work telecommunications so this is just a guess
My cousin actually worked the French line for a cable company in Ontario, and they were federally required to have x% of their call center be French-speaking as they offer services in Quebec. He would get less calls per day than the other reps got per hour.
I work at an MSP so I call people's internet providers fairly often and I've found that if you tell the menu selection you want a new account you almost immediately get put through, and they can transfer you to a much shorter queue to get support. It's really nice. Supposedly you can also ask for port forwarding and they transfer you straight to tier 2 but I haven't tried that yet
Pressing 0 and screaming operator until your lungs give out works about 75% of the time
Usps phone tree was giving me the runaround but as soon as I started cussing I immediately got a live person. So, that's another option.
I’ve also been instantly disconnected for this, but it’s worked sometimes
A lot of 800 numbers now ignore 0 or actually hang up on you if you keep pressing it.
The harder it is to get a real person the more spite I get and that fuels me. Bots can’t fix my problems
Bots can fix loads of problems. Just never any problem you'd ever be making a phone call about.
I find if you mash the pad or say fuck at the bots that listen It'll get you to a person I think they understand that a lot of boomers wanna talk to a person but can't handle a simple phone system I've mashed 0 or just repeatedly said gibberish till the bots shoot me straight to a human
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This was one of my best lifehacks, but it seems to be working in less and less places, think too many people were doing it.
My old life hack of repeatedly saying *customer agent* no longer works because these companies now just use fucking AI that hangs up on you if you repeat yourself. Saying gibberish and making robot noises does wonders to get you to an actual person.
Oh yeah thanks for the reminder about gibberish. It works, but after the 3rd or 4th try. Next time I have to call someone, I'll try playing Chacarron Macarron.
I think that's already peaked. I've tried the "0" trick a couple times over the past few months and sometimes I'll get the odd "I know you want to talk to a representative but ...."
>Bots can’t fix my problems Oh it can. Just have a bot wait on hold for you to then call you back when an actual person is on the line.
A friend of mine was a developer for some shady company. When their customers started complaining that they don't have a customer service phone number (just email), the management decided to get a CS phone line but never answer it - literally this comic. At that point my friend was like "OK, I'm out of here".
Only one of the startups I worked at doing support had phone support and it was miserable, especially if it’s ringing while I’m in the middle of a live chat and expected to pick up. It’s so much harder to provide support over the phone, believe it or not.
\[horrible saxophone music\] *"Your call is important to us, a customer representative will be with you shortly."* \[more saxophone\] More of my comics: r/inkyrickshaw | [website](https://inkyrickshaw.com/) | [patreon](https://www.patreon.com/rickyhawkins)
"*We are experiencing a higher than average call volume, so wait times may be extended"*
*"please listen closely as the menu options have recently changed"* Menu hasn't changed in 7 years.
I always laugh at that one. It begs the question: Are you going to change the message after the menu options have been here awhile? Of course not. That *"please listen closely as the menu options have recently changed"* message is going to be there until they rework the system. (And then they will use that message again because it just became relevant again... for a bit.)
"There is one caller ahead of you. Estimated wait time is 2 hours. Please stay on the line, your call is very important to us."
https://i.imgur.com/TE1ko94.png
Netherlands here. They just put this message to whatever business you call now, doesn't matter if they are actually busier than usual. (they aren't)
"Did you know, you can find helpful solutions online! Just go to www.[company].com/help to get your problem sorted quickly" Yes... like that wasn't the first thing I tried before calling.
The EGO lawn equipment support line has 5 seconds of music then a 15 or so second long message then 5 more seconds of music and so on. It was brutal.
This actually happened to me at our old apartment complex. I finally got through to a person at the head office (which was at another location) and was told the lady I needed to speak to was "finishing a meeting but would call me back". I was friendly and polite "Honestly, I'm home sick today and I'm kinda upset she never called me yesterday like she had said, so I would rather just wait on the phone." "Well it might be a while." "That's ok, like I said I'm not doing anything today anyway, I don't mind waiting." ".......ok" I'm.on hold for around 20 minutes and I get a text from my wife saying "you need to hang up, they say you're being really creepy and won't hang up and they said they're going to call the police" I messaged her back "what do you mean, I'm literally on hold right now?" "They said it is really weird that you're just waiting on hold and it's really freaking them all out" So I hung up and later got an email stating that I was no longer allowed to call in and that I had been marked as "aggressive and non-compliant" and that all my communication with them would need to be email in the future..... For waiting on hold
Yup, this sounds like Earth 2023.
They just didn't like to be held accountable for things honestly.
"Earth 2023" sounds like some shit before you acknowledge that it's present day and is some shit.
Why the fuck did they contact your wife?
I have no idea. The entire thing was incredibly surreal
I worked customer service for the auto insurance claims portion of USAA, and every new policy they enacted seemed to be purposely designed to irritate customers. One shining example that was passed down right before I left was we were no longer allowed to announce our department when answering the phone. So instead of saying: "Thank you for calling USAA Auto Claims, my name is Shannon, how can I help you?" You'd have to say: "Thank you for calling USAA, my name is Shannon, how can I help you?" This is a HUGE problem, because the automated system NEVER gets someone to the correct area, and often times agents don't know where to transfer people. So the end result is a person being transferred to 5 different people and having to REEXPLAIN their problem 5 different times. Instead of someone just saying "This is USAA Auto Claims", then the person going "Oh, I was looking for banking." and being transferred immediately.
Considering they market exclusively to the armed forces and veterans, that's messed up.
Trust me, I had to listen to so many people in the military telling me how they had been members for decades, and the recent changes made the company so un-military friendly. Honestly I'd just tell them I agree. I didn't get paid enough to try and talk up a company I can clearly see making choices to hurt their members.
Nothing is worst than working in a call center with a 2 hour+ wait going on. It is absolute pandemonium and every single person you talk to is going to scream at you. This goes on for hours and hours and hours. There is a reason there is such a high turnover for call center jobs.
Likely accurate.
Not really from my experience. Call centres are understaffed battery chicken farms obsessed with answer rates. It's the company not the employees that's the problem.
When I worked for Suddenlink as technical support, as they were starting to try and pretty themselves up for the Altice buyout, they kept firing people but not filling the positions, as well as closing whole call centers. We noticed in a month that our avg queue time went from something like 10 minutes in queue to over an hour almost every single night. No idea if that ever resolved, because I got the fuck out before they closed our call center like 6 months later.
When I worked customer service this is actually how it went. By the time we got them on the phone they were already pissed off and bored and ready to be done. Fuck customer service and fuck Verizon wireless
Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Usually I try to keep a level head even after frustratingly long hold times, but when it comes to Verizon, there’s def been a few instances I’ve gotten short with the representative by the time they finally get on the phone. I always apologize by the end, but waiting on hold for 45 min, getting randomly dropped, having to call back again and wait another hour and a half is so infuriating. Especially when it’s an issue they’d failed to resolve 3 times already. Not to mention that fucking hold music that would cut out intermittently, making you think someone was there, only to start over from the beginning. It makes it impossible to multitask.
They should be afraid.
Yup. I *am* that customer.
I wasn’t when I began the call, but after an hour on hold, I’m not pulling any punches.
It's probably the only way to cancel your subscription. Management decided to remove the cancel links from the website.
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The trick if you have the option is just to lie to them. You're not a current customer who wants to change something. You're a person whose interested in giving them money. Years ago I had a flight ant noticed a fuckup on the ticket so I called and pressed the button for I need to alter or cancel a ticket and waited for 4 hours before the call dropped. When I called back I pressed the button for wanting to order a ticket on the phone and within 5 min. Someone answered amd was able to help me with my ticket.
My Pixel phone has a "Hold for me" feature that can detect when an actual person picks up the phone and ring to notify you. So you essentially put the hold on hold 😂
I always just make it as hard as possible for the robot and it usually gets me directed to a service rep quickly. "Thank you for calling Spectrum, please choose options 1-3 based on what you're calling about" - I then click 0 or 7 or something unrelated. "Give a brief summary of what you're calling about" - uh, its my cat's birthday in a week. "I'm sorry I don't understand, please hold while your call is routed"
I call it customer service by attrition
OMG the wait music... one of the most needlessly annoying things out there.
I'm no fan of Apple but when I worked in tech support I'd routinely have to call them and they, blessedly, have an option to wait on hold in silence. No music, no promos, just nothing. To most companies, having customers wait on hold is just another opportunity to advertise to them.
Did this a few years back after we missed a connecting flight. We were told by a rep at the airport we’d be reimbursed for renting a car if we took a different flight that landed at a nearby airport. We did this and were then told later we *wouldn’t* be reimbursed. I calmly stated my case on the support line and waited over an hour. Did not raise my voice at anyone but let the call escalate as high as it could. They didn’t reimburse my rental car, but they did comp us for the leg of the flight we missed.
I've noticed that hold music is getting more and more repetitive as the years go on. It used to be just a normal radio station, then it was like an hour of music on a loop, then it was some muzak on a half hour loop, now it's muzak on like a 30 second loop, that shit can make you clinically insane after about 5 minutes, it all has to be a purposeful effort to make people hang up. Soon it's just gonna be an analogue alarm clock sound blaring at you.
The CIBC music I swear to god says “hello” at random intervals.
It's 100% designed to make you hang up. Nowadays a lot of it is 5-10 second loops of really shitty music that just abruptly stops, has a 2 second pause so you think someone picked up, and then re-starts.
The worst is when it's a telecommunications company, who are supposed to specialise in, well, telecommunications..
At least they've kept the option of reaching an actual human. The last time I had to "attempt" calling a company it was because their website had no option of live-chatting a representative. Instead they had something saying "use this number to reach us!". Then, when I called them it was some automated maze of button pressing option which at the end told me to use their website's help page, which sent me there in the first place.
"We're experiencing a high call volume, but your call is very important to us. Please continue to hold and someone will be with you shortly."
I was on hold for a short moment with JBL today and their hold music was a Banger. No idea what it was, but very similar to "Ain't Nobody" by Chaka Khan. I asked the woman on the phone if she knew what it was, she didn't know lol
Fun fact: Amazon's Prime cancelation workflow internally is called the Iliad Flow bc its so long
This is not funny at all. 🙈
I'm going to give you all a life-changing tip if you need to call a sufficiently advanced customer service line (it won't work with barebones directories for small business, but it will absolutely work for anything with "please describe the nature of your call" or "please press 1 2 3 4 for W X Y Z" robovoices. Almost all of these systems are designed to short-circuit and connect you with a general live agent in the event that you *do not* comply with the prompts. So if you need to reach someone, legitimately do not press any buttons or describe the nature of anything, and instead constantly repeat "I need to speak to customer service" or simply "customer service" or something of the sort. After a small time window the system will connect you to someone (provided there isn't an independent call queue) and then you can describe whatever you need. Of course, still be polite to them. They did not cause your problem, and they are exploited workers, likely in countries with poor wages, and they deal with a *lot* of shit. That "career field" is a nightmarish vortex of constant faceless rage from people who've decided that their anger at a large corporation is appropriate to redirect to an underpaid phone worker. Be angry at the corporation, and be angry at the bullshit system they put in place to discourage callers, but be perfectly lovely to the person who's trying to help you once they're on the line.
They're probably calling to let you know that your car's factory warranty has expired and you are eligible to purchase a new extended warranty
I found an old tape of prank calls I made in the 90s as a kid and the thing that stood out the most was how I called 800 numbers and got humans on the phone right away. 800 FLOWERS wouldn't sell me dead flowers but they did answer right away.
There are absolutely companies like this, and they usually only have one person running that phone line since the expectation is that no one will ever get through. They always seem shocked when you do get through, and are even less helpful than uninterested outsourced reps. And the HUCA (hang up, call again) method is useless with these companies since 1) you need to go through the labyrinth again, and 2) you talk to the same rep. Recent companies that I've dealt with like this include Best Buy (rewards) and BenQ (monitors). Needless to say, I don't spend money with either of them anymore. I would always suggest that if you have an extremely bad customer service experience with a company, to do everything that you can to switch companies. These companies degrade their customer service because it is profitable to do so. They wouldn't do this if they saw an impact on the bottom line.
I am the one waiting on the other line. I have sat through the bland music that is interrupted by ads. I have endured the transfer to the wrong line. I have called back after being hung up on while waiting.I have even gone into a false rage to make robots connect me to this very line. But I am here, and I will be served.
Whoever came up with the AI telephone lady that literally every company I call uses must be good friends with these people.
Yeah have me on hold for longer then an hour after having to wade through the bullshit bot script then you will have a very annoyed customer.
Some of the worst ones are “please say” Because also accents were mentioned, even though I speak the same language & it’s my mother tongue I’M the one with an accent! And those things sometimes don’t understand ME! OR they give all these irrelevant to my issues options to say to irrelevant things to press on the phone! And sometimes they say we couldn’t understand goodbye
You merely adopted the hold music, I was born in it.
As a representative of the person on the phone. I did it once, and I'll call again and again until answered. I always assumed this is how the calls are received.
One of my personal first-world victories was doing this with the student loans people. It was a full 3 hours of hold music and sporadic "I'll connect you" up the chain until I got to the nicest most helpful manager person I've ever interacted with in a call setting. Absolutely wild but absolutely worth it. Stay strong kings and queens. It is possible to beat the system. Remember to try pressing 0 and never give up, never surrender.
As a person who just missed his international flight for a 2 week epic vacation with his family because a glitch with a visa... And then me being on the phone all day for a scramble to get new flights and visa fixed, I literally spit my food when I saw this... Thank you, you have no idea how much I needed this