Interactive voice response cheat sheet

Sneaky Paul

What would you rather do? Talk to a human, or listen to a recorded voice tell you which numbers to push?

I don’t know about you, but I get more than a little stressed when I call a customer service number and then spend 10 minutes weeding my way thorough a maze of instructions before I finally get an actual human being on the line.

But I recently came across a blog page that can help. It’s called “IVR Cheat Sheet to Find a Human.” (IVR is an acronym for Interactive Voice Response.) A blogger named Paul English maintains this list of more than 100 companies in a wide variety of fields, such as finance, airlines, communications, shipping, retail, etc. Each entry on the list tells you inside secrets that let you hop over all the IVR prompts and go directly to a human.

Here’s a link you can use to access Paul’s IVR cheat sheet: http://www.paulenglish.com/ivr

And if you’re feeling stressed out this holiday season by IVRs, shopping crowds, etc., here’s a link to an e-Alert about knocking out your stress (without ripping the phone out of the wall):

http://www.hsionline.com/ealerts/ea200211/ea20021112.html

To Your Good Health,

Jenny Thompson