If the phone is still your weapon of choice when seeking customer service, you know that dialing an 800 number doesn’t mean you’ll get to talk to somebody right away. You’ll probably be prompted for your account number or phone number, and you’ll probably have to answer a few questions from a robot about your reason for calling. All of that serves, in theory, to route your call to the right person.
“We have dedicated agents in each group that really become subject matter experts in their area,’ says Cindy Parsons, vice president of public relations for Comcast’s Colorado region. She describes the impetus for what the company calls its “center of excellence’ model — in which certain groups in call centers specialize in certain products or processes: “I think it’s mostly the growth in the products. We started as a video company, and then we added data, then we added phone, now home security, now home control.’
The video person may not be able to help you with your phone problem, and vice versa. So you’ve got to work with the robot.
[Read: Related stories on customer service]
That is, unless you’ve memorized the sequence of numbers you’d need to push to get to your chosen department — or you’re armed with up-to-date information from a website like gethuman.com, which makes just such information available, along with hours of operation and average wait times, all via crowdsourcing.
Some of this information would be readily available — and presumably more reliably — on each service’s own website, but the fact that it’s all in one place on gethuman.com can be pretty handy. After a quick search, you might find the top-rated phone number to use to call Verizon, along with the recommended sequence of numbers to push to get a real person on the line.
The site isn’t perfect, though. For example, searching for Qwest is more effective than searching for what the service has gone by in Colorado for more than two years: CenturyLink.
There are also customer comments and votes on each mode of communication– so, for example, a phone number for CenturyLink features comments from users complaining that representatives they spoke with were difficult to understand. You can also find a ranked list of methods of contact. For Sprint, for example, the top recommended method is actually their online chat.
