Wednesday, January 30, 2008

"I Didn't Understand You. Did you Say Yes?"

So I have to vent a bit and apologize upfront for the rather lengthy post.

I have a HUGE gripe with voice command. You know when you call your credit card company, bank, or pretty much anything else these days and you have to use voice command instead of pushing the buttons. This annoys me.

I called a credit card company (a well known company) and wanted to talk to a costumer service representative but now they have voice command and frankly it is irritating. I hate saying “yes”, “no”, “more options” when I could just hit the 1, 2, or 3 button….and more importantly, “0” to take me right to Customer Service. (And though I will admit some companies use a combination of the two, which still allows old-fashioned people such as myself to use the button feature, this company was not having it. No button pushing here – well except mine!)

So, I tried saying "customer service representative" half way through and just pushing "0" but it didn't understand that. I later found out I should have only said representative. (sorry I didn't get that memo) And when I did follow the rules by listening through the ENTIRE menu and answering the appropriate voice promps; that annoyingly pleasant voice questions my answer…”Did you say yes?”.

By this time the response I wanted to shout was YES YES, FOR GOD SAKE I SAID YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course I couldn’t really yell that b/c that would lead too…”I am sorry, I didn’t understand that. Did you say yes?”

UGH…get my point, I am annoyed right now just talking about how annoyed I am.

Seriously, are they trying to get people enraged?!?! Because one of two things will happen. One, I will be so seriously pissed off I will take it out on the person in India that is trying to help me or two, by the time I actually get to customer service I am so emotionally drained that I will not even care what happens, thus negating the purpose for me calling in the first place.

So in summary…..I HATE voice command.

Just give me back the option to use buttons to make the selections I want…..like pushing a button in the first place was that challenging?


P.S. I also have to say that I hate that it takes 10 minutes to even get to a human being in the first place. They make it SO hard to get to a person. Well it takes 10 minutes to get through the voice commands to get to a queue to WAIT another 10 minutes to talk to a living person all while Kenny G. plays in the background. Grrrr

8 comments:

  1. I also hate voice command. You should at least have the option for key pad or voice. Irritating.

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  2. oh i am with you on this. HATE voice command.

    i will admit it: often i yell at the stupid thing and continue to hit "O" until i get a human.

    and once, when i was really pregnant and really hormonal, i actually started yelling at it and told it to go f**k itself.

    what did the voice command say to that: "I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response."

    hahahahaha.

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  3. I know what you mean, I hate voice command. I thought there were 6.5 billion people in the world, yet somehow there are a shortage of people able to answer the phone and say, "Hi this is _____, how may I help you?"

    We need more secretaries!

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  4. I don't even bother-I just hit '0' instantly. Usually the person you get is not worth talking to anyway.
    tlc:toooo funny!!

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  5. I hate it for these Top 2 reasons:
    1. When I call these things it's usually while Athena is napping so therefore I do NOT want to be yelling voice commands.
    2. More than once when I gave a command it for some reason thought that I wanted it to go Spanish on me and I was stuck en espanol.

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  6. Oh, an unrelated P.S. the eliptical that you were looking at in Wal-Mart... was in on sale for like $199? If so, it looks GREAT in person and it works VERY smoothly. I saw it and thought I would test it out for you :)

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  7. Ugh. I couldn't agree more J. Talk about taking the personal element out of life. More effective? To whom? Is it worth risking the happiness of your "loyal" customers?

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  8. Yes, it is truly annoying.

    TLC: I love it!!! haha!

    Nadja: Stuck in spanish would be worse!! And thanks for letting me know and testing it out! That is Awesome! I am going to have to go check it out!!

    K: I agree!! :)

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