zlacker

>>isp+(OP)
I never understand people who engage with chat bots as customer service.

I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support: "press 1 for internet problems" ... "press 2 to be transferred to a human representative". Only problem is going through like 7 steps until I can reach that human, then waiting some 30 minutes until the line is free.

But it's the only approach that gets anything done. Talking to a human.

Robots a a cruel joke on customers.

>>Michae+kd
Free tip for folks - this doesn't work every time (unfortunately), but sometimes just spamming and mashing numbers gets you to the operator faster than going through the stupid call tree. I guess it depends on how the default is set up in the software, Asterisk of whatever it would be. From my experience it seems you can either set up the call tree to restart from the root if you get out of its bounds or to default to some given option like the connection with a representative. To me this is easy enough to try every time so I just default to doing that. Sometimes the person on the other end will see you mashed in 60 numbers in the system I think and they will ask about it though. Easy enough in that case to politely ask them to relay to their boss that a customer though their system was too stupid to use and decided to short-circuit it like that. Not that anyone will care but still. :)

>>tomash+zk
Speaking gibberish sometimes works as well. Grab a dictionary and speak random words.

>>cjbgka+Eq
This reminds me that sometimes when the mashing of random numbers doesn't work, I'll repeat "OPERATOR! OPERATOR! OPERATOR!" at the machine until it yields. I guess it works by the same mechanism whereby the call audio is analyzed on the fly and if the algorithm determines the overlap with the corpus of terms at which it was trained is too low it will connect you to a human. Creepy if that's the case though.

>>tomash+ir
I tried the repeat ‘operator’ approach and the bot just hung up on me. I think the gibberish appears mentally disabled so they’re worried about being sued for not being accessible to people with disabilities.

>>cjbgka+xw
I've also had the experience of being hung up on by a robot as well for repeatedly asking for the operator. Because I'm definitely going to be in a better mood once I reach a human having been hung up on by a machine. Who thought that one up?!

On the other hand, maybe people on average are so grateful to reach a human that they're extra polite?