Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

Ever get really frustrated when you call a hotline or a company’s customer center and you can’t seem to get to a human?  I know I have had this problem, especially when I have had to call UPS.  But I have a little trick/hack that almost always works and send me directly to a human within seconds.

A guy I used to work with at a consulting firm told me about his days managing a call center for AOL.  Dream job, AOL call center.  He actually had a lot of really funny stories about working there.  He told me about how they would design their phone system so callers would just get so frustrated they would hang up because of how the options are so circular.  Very ridiculous, I know.  He taught me a trick about automated phone systems that will send you directly to a human.  Once you call and receive options if you say “Human”, “Agent”, “Human Being”, or one of a few cuss words, it will send you directly to a representative.  It is designed to take very frustrated people directly to a representative.  It works almost every time I have used it and it has saved me a lot of headaches.  So next time you call and get stuck in the hellish world of automated phone systems and all you want is to speak to a real person, just say one of the above things and it should send you to a person.