Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!hayes.ims.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: fozzie!stanley@uu.psi.com (John Stanley) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Why Companies Use Music On Hold Message-ID: <13815@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 19 Oct 90 18:07:56 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: One Man Brand Lines: 37 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 746, Message 5 of 10 Kevin Collins writes: > If you're bothered by the way a company handles (your) incoming calls, > let them know what you want! If they get enough complaints [and have a > decent ACD! :-)], they will be more than happy to change. I'm sure not > all companies are sensitive to the needs of their customers; any > *successful* company, IMHO, *must* be. Candidate for abuse of ACD and phone system in general: A large, book-o-the-month club has just billed me for a book not ordered nor sent. I call the number on the invoice for customer support. A recording answers: "Thank you for calling XYZ company. Our new customer service number is xxx yyy-zzzz." This wasn't the telco intercept, it was an XYZ recording I had to pay for. Ok. Called xxx yyy-zzzz. ACD answers: "If you are calling about paying an invoice, please call aaa bbb-cccc. If you are calling for customer service, please press 1 now." Now, it seems to me that an ACD with ONE entry in the menu is pretty worthless. It does nothing but eat up my time. (In essence, after the billions of $$ of telco equipment sorted out the ONE place I wanted to talk to, the XYZ company has a 5k$ box sorting its incoming calls into one basket.) It also seemed pretty un-friendly that I could have been stuck calling, not the one number published on the bill, but THREE numbers to get to talk to them. And least friendly of all was that the XYZ company answers the first number instead of having a non-supervising telco intercept. I tried explaining this all to the supervisor. She gave me a number that was, according to her, a direct incoming line to customer support. It was the same as the ACD number. Will they change? I doubt it. Not many people would realize they had to pay for the first intercept. Nor would they realize the stupidity of one-item ACD's. So most customers wouldn't complain.