Seriously, I’d rather either sit on hold and press buttons instead of trying to explain to an AI several times that I want it to connect me to a real person. I also have a “non standard” accent as well, so the thing probably cannot even understand me.
You might already be trying this, but whenever I encounter IVR systems I don’t want to deal with I just repeatedly cycle through the following words:
- Agent
- Human
- Operator
Usually at least one of those is treated as a trigger to forward to a normal queue. Then I usually get to deal with a human forced to do their best robot impression and strictly follow a workflow and response script.
Some of them are wise to this and won’t let you do it. The FedEx call bot actually hung up on me for doing it.
I was hoping there was some law (or at least fear of a lawsuit) that kept that functionality around for accessibility reasons. I suppose with the PSTN phasing out the last of the analog bits they don’t even worry about rotary phones anymore. Would still be nice to have the “Shibboleet” functionality…
