My personal pet peeve is when they play an ad before giving you the menu options.
First, wait thirty seconds for them to tell me how great their mobile app is. Then listen to the options, pick one, find out I picked the wrong one, and have to go back up one level. Now I have to listen to the ad again before I can hear the options.
I don’t care how proud you are of your app, I wouldn’t be calling you if I could solve my problem with it.
I once waited on hold for Microsoft support for 6.5 hours.
Fun fact: After hour 3 they stop playing music.
I remember there was a post where someone said if you yell a bunch of profanity into the phone then you skip the wait. Never tried it yet but if someone wants to give it a try let me know if it works out.
It used to work at Apple tech support like a decade ago. I know bc I worked IT and our little program gave us a heads up about A: how long people had waited in cue and B: if they had cussed a.k.a were angry. When angry customers got to me there’d be a little angry emoji on the screen lol and those customers still tended to be cussing when I picked up. Anyway, I was always told that was how you skip cue and confirmed bc on days where the average wait time for a cx was say 20 minutes I’d get angry cussers that had only been in line for a few minutes. On the flip side I can confirm this doesn’t skip cue for Verizon (noticeably) as I’ve cussed that robot 10 times to no avail. Dmv doesn’t care either, but Apple once did.
I can live with hold music even for an hour because I can keep it in the background.
The absolute WORST is when they play some music for 30 seconds, then the music stops, cutting to some voice recording peddling some bullshit like “try out [Product]!” or “Use our new mobile app!”. I can’t focus on anything else with it in the background because I think each time it cuts the CSR might have picked up the line.
Out of date tbh - It’s never a labyrinthine phone tree anymore, it’s a “natural speech” based menu that can never help with more than the most basic inquiries like “how much is my bill?” and still stubbornly refuses to put you in the queue for a real person.
Sometimes cursing will get you connected to a human.
