Consumers Rise Up Against IVR

The Great Escape from Voice Jail I'm nominating Paul English for the Nobel Peace Prize, for his service to better the health of all Americans. Singlehandedly, he has done more to reduce heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, every stress related illness, anger management issues, and just plain incivility. English has published his gift to humanity, The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Cheat Sheet online and available to all, and has bequeathed sanity to humankind. If you, like me, have found yourself about to pop a blood vessel as you spend ridiculous amounts of time working your way through automated Voice Purgatory, repeating your information two, three, and four times, only to never reach a person , or if you do, to reach someone who seems completely unaware that you have just spent the last 25 minutes repeating your information two, three, and four times, and asks you to repeat it all again, and who then tells you that, they cannot help you, you are in the wrong department, you must be transferred, and please hold, thank you for holding, even though they have given you no other option, and then you wait another interminable length of time, only to have to repeat your information YET AGAIN to another automated set of questions, and then to find, at the end of it all, that you are now speaking to someone in India, who you have trouble understanding because their accent is so thick, who has trouble understanding you, and who, they tell you, does not have the ability to solve your problem, and who says they will transfer you to the right area, which is THE SAME AREA THAT SENT YOU TO INDIA... if, like me, you have then found yourself thinking, "'Going Postal' should really now be known as 'going IVR'" and thinking up new and imaginative ways to do so, one of which involves fastening the relevant company executives to a chair and making them negotiate their own systems for 36 hours straight, with no end in sight, while listening to an endless voiceloop saying "Thank you for holding. Your call is important to us." .... That IVR passes for "customer service" is an abomination, and displays nothing more than a company's complete contempt for its customers. By conveniencing themselves, they are destroying their customer base. Kudos to Mr. English for giving consumers a way to fight back. Here's that link again. I've both printed the page and saved it to my desktop.