Looking for a way to avoid waiting on hold when making customer service phone calls?
Thanks to technological advances and tech savvy start-ups, there a multiple services and apps that will help you avoid waiting on hold when making phone calls.
Most of these services work by understanding the optimal touch-tone path needed to reach a customer service representative when calling major companies.
The services / apps will then wait on hold for you and give you a call back when a customer service representative is on the line.
Yes, you could always just put your phone on speaker phone and wait but who wants to listen to that awful elevator music when you could be, well, doing anything else?
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At times, it seems like companies purposely make customers wait in phone queues to prove their authority. In reality however, angry customers are never good for public relations so companies should be excited that third party services are available to help customer service experiences be less painful.
I’m going to list some iPhone apps to avoid waiting on hold below but I’m going to start by introducing a service available for everyone – even people with land-lines – that can help avoid waiting in customer service phone queues.
Top Apps and Services to Avoid Waiting on Hold:
1.Get Human
GetHuman is a great service that attempts to accomplish exactly what it’s name infers – getting in contact with an actual human when calling large companies.
The service offers expedited ways to get in touch with a human via phone, email and chat.
A quick search for “Bank of America” for example, spits out a list of departments at BoA that you may want to call:
After clicking on one of the links, the user is presented with a list of options available for getting in touch with a BoA customer service representative.
The user can then choose which option is best for them and follow the on screen instructions. There is even a way to call via you computer so you don’t even have to use a phone.
As you can see below, GetHuman also lists its average wait time for that particular department. Lets be real here, a 3 minute wait to get in hold with a Bank of America customer service rep is definitely an improvement on contacting BoA directly.
2. LucyPhone
LucyPhone works a bit differently than GetHuman but serves to accomplish the same goal.
LucyPhone offers both a web service and an iPhone and Android app to help you skip telephone waiting queues but does not provide quite as much information as GetHuman does.
If you search for “Bank of America” on the LucyPhone website, the service will then ask for your callback number. LucyPhone will then call BoA and call you back once a customer service rep is one the phone.
3. FastCustomer
FastCustomer is another service and apps that helps connect users with customer service reps in as little time as possible.
The major different that I’ve noticed with FastCustomer is that you can actually avoid making an initial phone call by texting the service and telling them which company you would like to call.
The service will then call the requested company and call you back when a customer service representative is on the line.
FastCustomer is not only available for iPhone and Android but also for Kindle and features a Google Chrome extension.
