Phone Rage 020808

Dear Editor:

Normally I have patience when it comes to everyday activities, and I like to conduct myself in a professional manner. I am cautious and conscientious and would never allow myself to submit to road rage, a phrase commonly associated with kind and gentle souls who turn into monsters when provoked by other drivers or undesirable traffic conditions. While I am immune to this affliction I must confess that I suffer from a far less dangerous but much more common condition that I will call phone rage.

Phone rage occurs when an automated phone system tries to prevent me from making contact with a human being. Of course automation is a way of life for business and industry, especially those that have call centers. But I find it to be a major frustration, a waste of time, and a factor capable of raising my blood pressure to the point where I discard my sunny disposition to become a customer service representative’s worse nightmare.

The typical call goes like this. After pressing 1 for English, I am given several prompts regarding the nature of my call. Upon making my choice I am given more prompts that lead to even more selections until the purpose of my call is narrowed down to the point where I have provided either my social security, account, policy, claim, credit card, phone, and/or any other number that is at least 9 digits or longer.

If I am in an open area and speak the requested numbers loud and clear enough to be processed, everyone within an earshot is exposed to my personal accounts. Keying in information can be frustrating, especially when the numbers aren’t memorized and I have to pause to look back at a card or paper. As a result I often find myself in a phone loop, asking me to repeat the entry over and over.

From experience I learned that pressing zero on the phone pad or saying “representative” will eliminate some of the prompts. But even when this is an option, I am often asked what I want to speak to a representative about, and I am provided with a different series of prompts. When I finally do make contact, I have to repeat everything that I already stated or keyed in.

When representatives ask how they may assist me, I usually tell them that they can start by recording my complaint about their automated phone system. Most agents are sympathetic, but many times when I ask why there are so many prompts, the answer I get most often is, “For your convenience.”

I therefore feel obligated to inform employees why this is not convenient, and I don’t stop until I am sure that I wasted as much of the agents’ time as the phone system did mine. Even then I refuse to move on to the purpose of my call until I receive a promise that my phone system comments will be forwarded to a top manager.

In fact, I am so devoted to fighting phone rage that I often said that if I ran for office and had the ability to do so, abolishing these automated systems or enforcing standard features to make life easier would definitely be on my platform. On every phone system clients should have a universal option of pressing zero or saying “representative” once, and only once, at the start of the call. This effort should take a caller right to a live employee, which as it is now, is often not the case.

I would not be able to solve our nation’s problems with this proposed law, but at least I would help regulate the blood pressure of a good number of Americans; so many that I would be bound to get their votes.