Does your phone attendant have any of these greatest hits?

“Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.”  — Who knew?  Who memorized them?  Who even cared, beyond the company serving them up?  What’s the punishment if the caller doesn’t listen?  Put yourself into a restaurant where your waitress says: “Please listen carefully, as our salad dressing options have changed.  For House, press 1.  For Ranch, press 2.  For French, press 3.  For Poppy Seed, press 4.  For Vinaigrette, press 5.”  No tip for you, one year!  (And is that House dressing flavored like bricks, wood, or is it musty carpet?  If you don’t give me any clues what it tastes like, but just give me your own cryptic keyword or title, how can I make any intelligent choice for or against it?)

Convoluted, impenetrable, obfuscatory, constipated bureaucratic verbiage – please just don’t.  Your company wants me off the phone, quickly.  I want to be served quickly, and off the phone.  We’re in this together.  Give me straightforward choices where I don’t have to use my doctorate to figure out the sentences.  Prompt me with English at a third-grade reading level, no higher.  I’m not looking at your sentences on paper; I’m hearing them sequentially on the phone (like a radio broadcast), and I can’t fast-forward with my eyes or ears.  Keep it simple.

Three nouns in a row, or three adjectives in a row, on the phone.  – Please prompt me with one noun and one verb.  Please greet me with one noun.  If you really have to add all that detail, put it into a second clause or sentence after the greeting…and you might realize that it’s expendable.  Don’t welcome me to “the state welfare agency support line office locator”, where five other nouns modify the truly important nouns: “office locator”.  (Truly important: what can this system do for me as the caller?)  It evidently belongs to the “state welfare agency”.  It’s probably a “support line” of some sort, by inference, since I’m calling it.

“Momentarily” and “shortly” – um, don’t you mean “soon”?  The word “momentarily” really means “only for a [fleeting] moment”; will the company representative speak in a blip and be gone?  “Shortly” takes twice as long to say as “soon”.  Get the junk out of there, and not a moment too soon.  Everybody knows that the agent will probably not be with them imminently, whether the system is trying to reassure them in that direction or not.

“Your call is important to us, so please stay on the line.” – What, you pulled me off the easily ignorable hold music just to tell me that you still don’t have a capable person available to pick up my call?  I put the phone back to my ear on hearing a voice, only to be told that I’m really still on hold for the indefinite future?  And that the company would rather have me wait forever on my own time/initiative than to bother any of their people?  If my call is important, if my time as your customer is in any way valuable, how about at least offering me a chance to leave a message now so the company can call me back on their time?

“For information on blah blah blah, press 1.” I press 1, and then it says, “For information on blah blah blah, please call:” and then a different company name and their phone number! – Now, why did the first prompt lead me to believe I’d find information here on this call? Please don’t make it the customer’s problem when merged companies can’t get their own acts together into a well-organized presentation.

“Eastern Standard Time”, as in: “Our business hours are 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time” – this almost sounds OK…but it’s wrong for half the year.  Are you going to change your automated system every six months so it correctly says “Eastern Daylight Saving Time” when appropriate?  How about just saying “Eastern Time”, leaving it that way all the time, and being done?

“Seven days a week” – strike that.  “Every day.”

“If you know your party’s extension, enter it now.” – I was invited to an extended party?  Cool!  Didn’t party lines on the phone go out sometime in the mid-1970s?  Why is this mock formal operator-ese, “your party”, still with us?  I’m calling the company to contact either a person or a department (or division).  How about: “If you know the phone extension of the person you’re calling, enter it now.”

“Visit us on the web at w-w-w, blah-blah-blah-blah” before the caller gets to make any choice. – No.  Please, no.  I called your company on the phone because your web site already didn’t give me what I needed.  I got your phone number from the web site, and I’m calling to follow up with a person or department on something I specifically need.  An automated phone call shouldn’t beg me to hang up right now and go away, even if that’s what (judging by behavior) the company really does want.  Furthermore, I’m not going to have a pen and paper handy to jot down your web address anyway, so why are you wasting my time with it?

“Please press” with every number, where the repeated “please” gets annoying. — It’s false politeness. We’re already dealing with a machine instead of a human. The “please” just sounds formulaic instead of sincere.  Please please please PLEEZZE PLEEEEEZZZZE condescend to push my buttons, saith the computer.

“Sorry, I didn’t get that.” – There is a separate essay about this stinker.  In summary: a computer is never sorry, and computers actually have less empathy (and inspire less empathy) than road kill does.  I don’t want to hear a computer apologize about its own inadequacies to serve me; I just want to be served through simple and direct questions about my needs, so I can follow the instructions and be done.

“For all other questions, including fruit bats and breakfast cereals, press 5.” – Look, doesn’t “all other questions” already catch everything I could possibly be calling about?  Why do the fruit bats and breakfast cereals need to be mentioned?  If they’re that important, shouldn’t they be their own options, and make the catch-all category be 6 or 7?  A pretty good rule of thumb is: a prompted option should probably never have the word “including” in it.  Even if you’re going to send options 5, 6, and 7 all to the same agent who handles “general” stuff, perhaps you could at least log or whisper the choice separately…and give less frustration to the caller hearing the menu, too.  “All other” means all other.

“For general information, press 1.  For information about dingo’s kidneys, press 2….” – Why is my “general” option in front of the list of specific options?   I don’t feel like listening all the way through the menu, to decide if I should have pressed 1 a long time ago.

“We are currently assisting other customers. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” – If it has to say anything there, how about: “Please hold on, and someone will speak with you as soon as possible. Our people are still helping other earlier callers.” ?

“For more information, call 847-273-7502 during regular business hours.  Thank you.” – Impossible.  I have no warning that a phone number is going to be blurted in my general direction, no opportunity to write it down (even if I wanted to), and no information on their regular business hours…whoever it is.

There are easy ways around all of these problems.  Just think each of them through from the perspective of a caller who knows nothing about your company.

More to come.  See also a very long list of ideas….