EU Outlaw Automated Phone Menus
European Parliament to bribe British public to stay in the EU by outlawing automated phone systems. In the run up to the hotly debated EU referendum in June many promises are being made by both the Bremain and Brexit camps, all of which have their benefits or detractions depending on your point of view.
However the latest sweetener from the members of the European Parliament who are hoping that the Brits are going to vote to stay in Europe is a pledge to outlaw all automated telephone systems.
Due to high-profile campaigns such as that led by PleasePress1.com's founder Nigel Clarke, it has come to the attention of the politicians in Brussels that the British are becoming increasingly frustrated with badly designed phone menus (technically known as IVRs) and that the complete abolition of such technology could persuade voters to stay in Europe.
The proposal is that as early as July 2016 all phone menus will be abandoned and replaced with thousands and thousands of call centre operatives who just pick up the phone when it rings.
According to Czech MEP Dubnu Blázen, who is leading the initiative, completely doing away with phone menu technology will create the perfect telephone experience for customers - and hang the expense to the companies, "We have introduced many laws in the past which have benefited the consumer at the cost of companies, such as the straight banana & cucumber directive of 1995 and our ruling in 2010 that eggs cannot be sold by the dozen. If multi-national corporations have to hire tens of thousands of workers and build new offices to house them in order that our citizens can avoid negotiating layers upon layers of push button menus and automated voice recognition systems - then so be it!".
But our founder Nigel Clarke insists that there is a better way
to improve the user 
experience when contacting
customer service call centres without racking up the costs to
businesses, "I would suggest to any company looking to
improve the call centre experience for their customers that
the first step is to provide or verify your existing phone
menu on PleasePress1.com. The second step is to get in touch with
us directly to discuss our bespoke phone menu solutions which are
proven to improve customer retention & satisfaction
levels, prevent unhappy customer defection, reduce customer
service costs and dramatically increase use of web-chat and
self-serve portals - in less than 7 days!"
Nigel concluded "Whilst I think that any moves towards improving the customer service call centre experience are positive, I think that this proposal from the EU goes a bit too far! If consumers, PleasePress1.com and companies all work together to highlight and then improve on current poor practice then we can facilitate our own customer experience revolution!"
For more information on how to use PleasePress1 as a consumer please see here and for companies looking to find out how to make improvements to their phone menu design and improve customer service at the same time as reducing costs, please contact us.
12.10pm 1/4/2016 Ok, we can file the article above under 'fiction' - was a bit of optimistic fun for this special April day.
Photo credit: dan at Freedigitalphotos.net