3-On Your Side: Phone Dialing Secrets
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- How often does this happen to you? You call a business only to be directed through a maze of automated voices. But there is hope. 3-On Your Side's Jim Donovan shares some tips so that you can talk to a human.
Making an airline reservation? Calling your credit card company? Usually you'll have to get past a recording first, in more languages than one. Then you'll wait. Sometimes you can talk, but it won't be to a person, you'll be communicating with a machine. These computer systems are known as IVR's, or Interactive Voice Response.
Getting through to a live person isn't always easy, that is unless you know the tricks. Websites like dialahuman.com and customerservicenumbers.com offer codes to get you to someone quicker. For example, when calling Verizon, if you hit 0 0, you'll reach a representative faster. Calling your local CVS store? Punch the numbers 4 and then 2 to get to a real person. And dialing 4, pausing, then dialing 1 will allow you to speak to someone quickly at USAirways.
Watch the video...
"People don't like waiting on hold, and don't like repeating themselves," says Mike Oristian. So he and his brother Tom came up with a solution they call Lucy, which is short for Lucy Phone. Mike says, "Lucy provides the ability for you to have Lucy wait in your place, she is somebody who waits in line for you, while you are waiting in line to actually speak to an agent on customer service."
How does Lucy work? Well when you're put on hold while using the service, simply hit the * key twice, and LucyPhone takes over. You can hang up and when a human picks up on the other end, LucyPhone rings you back, even when you're on the go. Tom says, "We have an iPhone app and Android app, people can download those from the Android app store or the iPhone app store and it lets you initiate a Lucy phone call through your device."
Which can come in handy. As Mike points out, "The most frequently called LucyPhone numbers are going to be cable, satellite, wireless companies as well as airlines, any company that deals with outages or service delays that are related to weather. Saving you time and aggravation.
By the way, LucyPhone is a free service and works with toll free numbers and while the dialahuman.com and customerservicenumbers.com web sites show you the short cuts to speak to a live person, you can contribute to the sites too. For links, click below.
www.customerservicenumbers.com
Reported by Jim Donovan, CBS 3
