sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information gethuman

The sad thing is "the phone system" always get blamed for voice mail jail. It's all about proper programming.
Common sense should tell you to always have a 0 out option (and to actually use 0). Common sense should tell you to limit the number of levels that the customer has to navigate to get a person. With one exception all my auto attendants have one tier.

Richard

Alot of my customers build HUGE multi-tiered menus trying to give the caller every possible option for info. Too many times I just shake my head & say, "what if YOU were calling in here?"
The customer is usually adament about getting this set up. Also, too many times they insist I turn off the "0" option so as to "force" the caller to "use" the menu options to "find" their info that they are calling about.

:bang:

That's it. If you present that question and they don't see the wisdom of it, then trying to argue further is indeed, as the emoticon suggests, banging your head against a wall. It's what radio talk show host Clark Howard calls Customer No-Service.

Richard

There's also a point for providing better customer service through call centers and voicemail.

Suppose the point is to give callers the option of either leaving a message for a callback or going into a queue. If the caller can Zero Out, and they all do, then a receptionist has to manually transfer them right back into the queue or to the voicemail box that they would have reached anyway if they hadn't gone Neo-Luddite at the first Electric-Lady voice.

Then they're even more pissed off, because they've been to the queue once, the receptionist once, and the Auto-attendant twice. In the end, the customer has to decide what's acceptable or unacceptable as far as VM layers, queue interflow times, and Zeroing out. As I sometimes tell customers, "I can only advise. I don't make admin decisions."