Note: A version of this appeared in the June issue of Business to Business.
Among the many circles of phone tree hell, I have just discovered a fresh torture. Any companies that think their new interactive voice response systems are making the whole maze of options less painful for phone-in customers need to think again.
But let’s start at the beginning. I am prone to allergies. Not the gentle, occasional ah-choo variety with chance of lightly watering eyes allergies, but huge, horrendous allergies with gale-force sneezing and eyes so teary I look to be perpetually leaving a funeral. It takes me about two weeks to get build up a tolerance to any allergy medicine, so treating my seasonal hay fever consists primarily of buying stock in Kleenex and hoping fervently that I don’t have an attack merging into the construction on I-90.
The last week has been horrible—trees budding, flowers blooming, pollen shedding—at least from my nose’s perspective. I look and sound like I should sell my stock in Kleenex and buy a share in an allergist’s practice instead. It was in this state that I visited the dentist this morning. After spending some time with a very nice hygienist who may also be moonlighting for the Marquis de Sade, I was informed that I really needed to buy one of those fancy new electric toothbrushes, unless I wanted to spend considerably more time at the dentist in the future.
Being a good patient, I went home after the cleaning and promptly called the customer service line of one of the recommended toothbrushes to find a local retailers. (I had tried the website but with no success.) This particular giant Dutch conglomerate offered a simple menu to perform automated functions but no chance to talk to a human being without an invitation from Queen Beatrix. Lacking that, I attempted to find a Bozeman store using the simple voice-recognition menu.
“To find the location nearest you, please tell us your five-digit zipcode,” the pleasant voice told me.
Trying desperately not to sound like a cartoon character, I said, “Fibe-nide-seben-ode-fibe.”
“Did you say, ‘Five-five-seven-nine-five?” the voice asked.
“No!” (Or should I say, “DOH!”?)
And back to the main menu I go, where I have to again choose what I want to do and then get the disembodied voice to understand my allergy-wracked one. It never did work. I even tried going old school, punching in digits on the keypad, but that really confused the little Dutch girl. She hung up.
All of which made me wonder what would happen to someone who called with less than perfect pronunciation that wasn’t caused by seasonal allergies. Is this a problem with all voice-recognition phone trees, or are the Dutch—seasoned linguists that they are—just pickier about proper English? Whatever the case, it served as a reminder that companies who are serious about customer service need to offer an easy out of their voice mail hells. There should always be the option to speak to a live person, even if that means the customer sits on hold for a few minutes while listening to some pleasant background music.
I’m not saying that a live human would have necessarily been able to understand me on the first try—I do sound like a prize-fighter after a particularly rough round of face-punching—but at least I wouldn’t have had to start over each time. And I think, eventually, I would have gotten my question answered. That never did happen with this round of the phone tree tango.