An Idea Whose Time has Come

By Stacy Karacostas

We’ve all been there before…right?

You have a technical problem with your computer, internet service, cell phone or even worse a billing problem with say…your phone company or utility service. So you pick up the phone and give them a call.

And of course the first thing you hear is a pre-recorded voice (thankfully these have improved over the years), usually asking you if you want to proceed in English or Spanish.

Then the maze of choices begins. Press one for this, say seven for that. And after about twenty minutes of aggravation you either finally get a live person (who may or may not actually be able to help you), or you hang up in frustration.

If you are lucky, you can just hit “0”, bypass the entire system and get taken immediately to a real live person. But companies are getting wise to that maneuver. Enough so that these days pushing “0” is just as likely to dump you right out of the system, or force you to start over from the beginning. Uggggh!!

Recently—after a particularly frustrating call to my credit card company—I couldn’t help thinking about how much time (and energy and stress) I wasted playing these round and round games with electronic “customer service”. And we all know time is money. Heck, time is even more valuable than money because you can never get any more of it.

So when I ran across an incredible Website that solves the entire problem—www.gethuman.com—I just had to let you know.

The fabulous folks who started this f*ree Web resource have compiled an amazing database of shortcuts and workarounds for hundreds of companies. It tells exactly what numbers to punch in to you get a real live body on the phone right away! Really!!

They even have feedback surveys you can fill out to let them know if their information was correct, and what your overall customer service experience was.

Here’s a little bit about their service “straight from the horses mouth”…

“Our goal is to improve the quality of customer service and phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.

We will soon publish a list of the best and worst mass-market consumer companies in the US based on how long it takes to get to a human on the phone and on the quality of support received. ”

So the next you are getting ready to call customer service or tech support, take a few seconds and head over to gethuman.com first. The time and trouble you save makes it more than worth it.

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