Companies That use Voice Mail Systems and Prompts

The public is sick of voice mail systems and prompts. I worked for a major U.S. Airline in the late 1980s in the domestic reservations department. When I first started working for this U.S. Airline (Do you get the hint of who I worked for yet?), we had no voice mail system for the public when they called the airline's 800 reservations number.

As an airline reservationist, I answered all the 800 calls, making reservations, confirming reservations, taking credit card numbers/checks for people to buy their tickets, checking to see if flights were on-time, checking for lost baggage, and etcetera. When someone needed an international reservation, I'd simply transfer the call to the international reservations department.

Then management announced they were going to start a voice mail system where the public would need to press buttons to get through. When the system was put in place, I (in domestic reservationists) would still take all the calls and would only have to transfer calls going to international reservations. Nothing changed for the employees and what we did.

We finally found out why management put this system in place. Management wanted a report as to who was calling and why. Yes, management needed their official reports and didn't mind that it made it more difficult for the public to get through.

And here's another scenario. I work for a print shop now. Our customers will send us jobs without directions. I wish I could read my customer's minds as to how they want their prints jobs run. My company does not keep customers specs on file and for a good reason. You can run a print job a million different ways. For example...

A customer might run their job in color for ten orders in a row. We know what the customer wants, right? The 11th order comes in and we run the job in color again. The customer gets their 11th order and calls us and complains. They wanted the 11th order to be run in black and white, they needed the prints for their file copy. Too bad the customer didn't tell us this upfront. More times than not, they don't.

So, what's the point?

The customer gave us their office phone number and they refused to write down their office extension. We call their main office number, get the voice mail system and punch in the person's first or last name and the voice mail system says that person doesn't work there. (Of course, pressing zero does not ring anyone, you get someone's voice mail.) We can't get through to our customer because their company voice mail system has not been updated for all their employees. The customer is mad the job is late or because the job was run incorrectly. It's all because companies think it is clever to install a voice mail system.