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Get Human!

Did you get a great deal on phone service, only to find that there was a mistake on your bill? And now, every time you try to call, you get cycled through voice mail hell? Or maybe you have this same problem with the cable company, the bank, or tech support?

Now there is a resource for you to look up ways to get around the numbers, codes, responses, that cycle you eternally in the automated queue.

Gethuman.com is a site that maintains a database of frequently called customer service numbers, and the tricks to actually get a person on the phone. Sometimes it is done by not pressing any buttons. Sometimes you have to press only the O for operator. And for others, there are actual direct lines listed.

With so many transactions now being automated, from bill pay to booking travel to buying stock, the human customer support representative is more and more inaccessible unless you sit on the phone, punching in all the numbers, and maybe getting disconnected through a glitch in the system. By looking up this information submitted by other users, you can save yourself some time and frustration.

Much of the information is unverified, so you have to realize that some of the numbers may not work. But the tricks – such as entering 000000 instead of an account number or a combination of pressing 0, #, and waiting – are really invaluable. This really helps when you are entered into several levels of a queue, each one repeatedly asking your information. I find that process particularly frustrating when dealing with tech support of any kind – you’re stressed out before you even get to explain your problem to the tech.

Be very careful about contacting any of the direct lines and giving your personal information or your passwords or social security. Make certain that you are speaking to an actual representative of the company – dialing numbers listed as direct contact on gethuman.com should be done at your own risk.

Another interesting feature of the site is the space for user comments about their experiences with companies. As most of us suspected, Cable companies are among the worst for confusing customer support. Reading these experiences helps you prepare for what to expect (and what to do about it) when you DO get a human on the phone.

We’ve come a long way from the days of phone operators who manually connected each call who were brilliantly satirized by Lily Tomlin, whose character Ernestine the operator used to answer the line saying “Is this the party to whom I am speaking?”. Yet, we sometimes need a human to complete the connection between entering the numbers and getting the actual service. Gethuman.com is an idea whose time has come.

Meantime, here are some ideas for how to work with customer service operators:
http://computers.families.com/blog/tips-to-get-better-customertech-support