Wow! What we all want! A way to not have to mess around with interactive voice response systems! Bringo provides a categorized and an alphabetical list of companies to choose from. You find your target, enter your telephone number in the form, hit enter, and a few minutes later your phones rings. Pick it up and there’s a human being. I just tried it with Cingular Wireless. The hinge on my wife’s clamshell style phone (it is an LG C1800) has broken and it’s a $50 insurance replacement but a theoretically free warranty replacement but try handling a warranty replacement through their Web site — to describe it as a miserable experience really doesn’t convey the full horror. So, I need to deal with a Real Human Being or a Cingular Customer Service Droid, whichever I get first … but before I can do that, I need to battle their IVR or maybe not … So, I entered my number and, ah! My phone is ringing … ah, it is Bringo asking to confirm my phone (this obviously prevents you from using Bringo to annoy other people) and … one minute elapsed … five minutes … failed. At least Bringo tells me (“Ooops! The representative at Cingular Wireless – Personal Sales hung up before we could connect you”) and offers the chance to retry. So, I’ll retry …. Humm. The feedback from the site after you ask them to retry is poor — it will be working but the display will tell you nothing and then when you try again it tells you that a “search” is in progress. So, I’m waiting for my phone to ring … In the meantime, there’s another project that aims to cut through the IVR jungle is the GetHuman Project, created by Paul English, which aims to create (according to their press release): “new standards for telephone-based customer service. Microsoft Corp., Nuance Communications, Inc. and other industry leaders, businesses and consumers will work with the GetHuman project to drive adoption of these standards that are designed to eliminate poor caller experiences with automated systems.”
The press release continues, “Some of the proposed GetHuman standards include always giving callers the option to queue for a human, with estimated wait times provided, and also offering a call back option. The proposal also requires that systems never make a caller repeat any information that they had already provided during the call, and that all companies provide a simple mechanism for callers to rate a call for the quality of service provided. … After a comment period of 60 days, the GetHuman project team will incorporate community feedback and publish a final design document. Companies can then register their GetHuman-compliant phone service at http://www.gethuman.com and begin to adopt the GetHuman “earcon”, an auditory icon that signals to callers that the company uses best practice customer service standards.” If your company uses IVR this is definitely one to watch and participate in. Anyway, I’m still waiting for a callback from Bringo … more later when it happens …
