Avoid the Customer Service Phonetree hell!
April 23, 2008 – 1:43 am
Bringo.com fetches a human voice to various customer service call centers and calls your number when they get someone on the line (or close to)
Bringo.com (aka nophonetrees.com) is an amazing online service that goes and fetches a human customer service representative to various major corporations and calls you after traversing the phone tree for you! Its like having your own personal administrative assistant fetching you a person on the phone.
Many a times, when calling the big corporations, you spend more than a few minutes enunciating your account number several times and traversing several phone tree forks before getting lost in the phone tree forest and having to start all over. Even when you eventually get a person, sometimes they tell you that you’ve called the wrong department and transfer you to a whole new phone tree hell. AUUGH!
BRINGO.com cuts through all of that so you don’t have to. That’s right, BRINGO has conquered phone trees.
Here’s how it works:
- Go to the website at http://www.bringo.com
- Find the company you’d like to call by category (credit cards, mortgages, loans, health care)
- Enter your phone #
- Wait a few seconds while we navigate the phone tree.
- When we call you back, pick up your phone and you’re done. No more phone trees.
The website has several categories that you can choose from for the company you are trying to reach:
Auto (119 companies)- Communication (55)
- Computer (54)
- Financial Services (223)
- Health Care (96)
- Media (26)
- Other (61)
- Retail (129)
- Travel (65)
- Utility (18)
I tried it with two of my major phone tree support nemesis, Verizon Wireless and Mcafee. It worked!
For Verizon I got a call within a minute, and when I picked it up, I was on hold for 10-15 seconds, and a human picked up! I’m sure I confused the representative when I indicated that I had called the wrong number.
For Mcafee, I did have to select one option then was put on hold for the next available representative. (I hung up before they picked up) Not too bad. Normally, Mcafee requires several slow enunciations of account numbers, along with a horrid phone tree trying to explain your problem to a robot.
Truly a great time and sanity saver. Give it a spin next time you need to call a customer representative.
Similiar: Google’s free 411 service