• elrik@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    FedEx has one of the worst phone support systems. It goes out of its way to tell you you’re an idiot for wanting to speak to a human being because you can’t possibly need any more information than what it has already told you. Then it proceeds to just hang up on you.

  • BenVimes@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    My personal pet peeve is when they play an ad before giving you the menu options.

    First, wait thirty seconds for them to tell me how great their mobile app is. Then listen to the options, pick one, find out I picked the wrong one, and have to go back up one level. Now I have to listen to the ad again before I can hear the options.

    I don’t care how proud you are of your app, I wouldn’t be calling you if I could solve my problem with it.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I haven’t had that one yet, but I’d be hitting 0 like no tomorrow and if it didn’t work once, I’d keep doing it just to drown out the ad.

  • Eczpurt@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Makes sense now why every company always has some deep fried 10 second loop hold music…

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My high school had a CD player of hold music that played, it was stupidly easy to find. We stole the CD of musik and replaced it with one by Black Sabbath. That was a good day.

    • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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      1 year ago

      The other day I had called a company… They had a music playlist of different elevator musics… I was on hold for well over an hour… No song repeated.

      I don’t know if I should be impressed that there was no repeats… or if I should be scared to ever do more business with them since it’s clear they thought about putting people on hold for longer than an hour.

      • djmarcone@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I was once on hold with zoom for over 2 hours. I think they were very upset with me that I persisted. In the end they were zero help.

        This comic is about zoom.

  • Dettweiler@lemmyonline.com
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    1 year ago

    Systems like this are why I really appreciate the “Hold for me” feature on my phone. You just have to be quick when an actual human picks up, or they’ll put you back on hold.

  • harmonea@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Out of date tbh - It’s never a labyrinthine phone tree anymore, it’s a “natural speech” based menu that can never help with more than the most basic inquiries like “how much is my bill?” and still stubbornly refuses to put you in the queue for a real person.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Love to scream at my phone because the fucking robot can’t understand me.

      Key presses are so simple! Why do I have to talk to the dumb fucking robot?!

      • harmonea@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s astounding how universal this hatred is. No one likes these things except the people who think it saves on labor costs (which, does it even? they’re replacing a menu that was already automated…)

        • harmonea@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          It doesn’t even take swearing for some of them - I had one earlier this week that hung up on me when I tried pressing zero to see if that got me anywhere. Touchier than humans.

          • BottleOfAlkahest@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Comcast once hung up on me because the system wanted to transfer me to a department whose phone system hadn’t yet be set up in my region…the system force transfered me to a number that didn’t exist and I was immediately disconnected.

          • SolarNialamide@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            My pharmacy is ridiculously short-staffed because of summer, so they’re only open for 3 hours in the afternoon. But because everyone is calling in those 3 hours, it’s so busy you don’t even get put on hold, it just says the wait time is too long and to email them and hangs up, lmao.

      • mrspaz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The worst is when they phrase the response as if there was just some slight, funny misunderstanding on the part of the machine; “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that! Did you want to…”

        For some reason that one really drives my ire.

          • poppy@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            The fake typing is the worst. It just sounds like someone slamming random keys.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Hold on while we look up your account.

            Fuck you. How can it possibly take any time to query a SQL database in 2023? The first tenth of the second of you calling them they should have taken your number and pulled it up.

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I remember there was a post where someone said if you yell a bunch of profanity into the phone then you skip the wait. Never tried it yet but if someone wants to give it a try let me know if it works out.

    • Wrench Wizard@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It used to work at Apple tech support like a decade ago. I know bc I worked IT and our little program gave us a heads up about A: how long people had waited in cue and B: if they had cussed a.k.a were angry. When angry customers got to me there’d be a little angry emoji on the screen lol and those customers still tended to be cussing when I picked up. Anyway, I was always told that was how you skip cue and confirmed bc on days where the average wait time for a cx was say 20 minutes I’d get angry cussers that had only been in line for a few minutes. On the flip side I can confirm this doesn’t skip cue for Verizon (noticeably) as I’ve cussed that robot 10 times to no avail. Dmv doesn’t care either, but Apple once did.

  • mommykink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Pro tip: If you start yelling the robot will forward you to a real person. I personally just yell my McDonalds order

  • cmhe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They just didn’t try hard enough. I tried calling my energy provider. You have to call more than 5 times, to even get to the robot call system. Other times they line is just dead. Then you have to listen to adverts over adverts and at the end the line just goes dead again. Trying the same number with with landline or mobile also gives differrent results, I once or twice got to the point where I it might have ringed some phone. but after a couple of rings, the line just goes dead again.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My name is common enough and I got some court paper work sent to me by mistake meant for the other guy with my name. Ended up having to call the state level court and my local one. After hours finally get the right department and its a fax machine. I ended up having to fax messages back and forth.