gethuman customer service tips

finding a toll-free phone number

To find the toll-free phone number for any US-based company, try calling 1-800-555-1212 or search Google for company name plus "phone numbers". Or maybe even searching for the company name and "president office" or "investor relations".

Tip: did you know that your phone company charges $1.49 or more each time you call 411? Instead, try using 1-800-FREE-411 or 1-800-GOOG-411 (Google's free 411 service).

For companies who try to hide their phone numbers, many times the Google search will find a page from a disgruntled customer who exposes the phone numbers for that company. For example, see these gripe pages about Amazon.com and PayPal and these for eBay and Walmart.

For a public company, you could also try searching EDGAR. The "10K" report includes information about corporate officers and the official company mailing address.

You could also try looking up their contact information via a "whois" database: internic, godaddy, whois.net, etc.

getting to a human

Once you have a phone number, here are some tips to try to get through the computer to get to a live human:

1. Interrupt. Press 0 (or 0# or #0 or 0* or *0) repeatedly, sometimes quickly. Unfortunately the same keystroke does not always work for each company. Many IVRs will connect to a human after a few "invalid entries", although some IVRs will hangup. :-(

2. Talk. Say "get human" (or "agent" or "representative") or raise your voice, or just mumble. :) The IVR might connect you to a human after one of these key or unknown phrases.

3. Just hold, pretending you have only an old rotary phone.

4. Connect to account collections or sales or account cancellation; they always seem to answer quickly. First ask them for their name and rep number (so they know you are writing it down, and thus so they are more likely to help you.) Then ask them to transfer you to the department you need. Sometimes they will put you ahead of the queue, although sometimes they will send you to the end (and thus in those cases this tip is useless).

5. Toll call. For credit cards, if the expected wait time is too long, hangup and try to call back on their non-toll-free number, as they often have shorter queues.

6. Selecting the option for Spanish will sometimes get you a bilingual human more quickly than if you just waited for an English-only operator.

When you do finally find a human, ask them how to connect directly the next time (in case your call gets disconnnected etc), and be sure to tell us so we can then list their number here. :-).

If one of the above does not work, see the gethuman database.