A standard layout for phone trees

gethuman jingle? No, I'm not really going to punish you by making you listen to a gethuman jingle (although I do hope you enjoy the video). But as I was talking with Bill Taylor today, I remembered an IVR idea I had many years ago. ..

As a "Type-A Techie", I like things which are concise. I despise verbosity, especially from computers. Why do I have to listen to the IVR menus of each company I call, only to hear them say "Please listen, as our menu options have changed". It isn't enough punishment to make me learn a different phone menu for each company, but now I have to learn the menu of the week?

Wouldn't it be cool if some consumer group came up with a STANDARD phone menu tree? So that any company you called would all allow stuff like: 0 for operator, 1 for customer service, 2 for sales, 3 for billing questions, etc. Then I would never have to listen to the stupid "Your call is important to us" nonsense. The * key might always mean go back and the # key might always mean confirm. Or something like that.

Maybe we should copyright a few musical tones as the gethuman jingle, and then we should define a standard phone menu tree, such jingle and tree put into the public domain. Then any company who wants to be gethuman compliant would change their IVR to first play the brief gethuman jingle (maybe less than one second long) which would tell the callers that they didn't have to listen to the phone system describing itself, but instead informing the caller that we could punch away.

Any musicians out there?

Posted by GetHuman on Mon, 13 Feb 2006 12:00am