I hate telephone queues. I hate hold music. I hate those educated-sounding deep-voiced gentlemen or sweet-sounding dignified ladies who try to sell me a company’s products when I’m already ON THE LINE WITH THE COMPANY!
I hate that guy who keeps telling me I’m in a queue and asking me whether I want to keep holding. If I didn’t want to keep holding, I’d hang up.
I mostly hate waiting for a customer support agent to pick up my call from a queue. When waiting’s not an option there’s a trick you can use for skipping the queue: just call the sales line instead and act confused.
If you’re a ‘nice’ person, and don’t want to go over to the dark side, stop reading now.
Because companies essentially exist to make money, they’re generally going to have a staff available to answer sales calls. For this reason, you can often expedite your support call by simply calling the sales line instead.
At the very least this will prevent you from dealing with the telephone tree as you can ask the sale rep to transfer you to the proper department. Get their name as well, just to make them feel responsible for you. In some cases, if you act confused, you can request that the sales rep stay on the line with you until you get to the correct department, or even ask them directly to transfer you to someone who can help.
Because they probably don’t want to wait on hold either, this can bump you to the head of the line. This is extremely unfair to the others who are legitimately waiting, but should you be in a particular hurry one day and really need to get ahead, it’s not a bad tip to put into practice.
Just be ready to lose a few karma points.