GetHuman: new site helps you navigate call centres and get to the human

If you’re tired of endlessly keying in buttons and listening to hold music while waiting to talk to another human about your phone bills or your dishwasher insurance – then there’s a website that could help you cut through the call centre rage. GetHuman is a smart website that helps you get to the human.

It’s a user-generated collection of tips and tricks to help you hack the call centre roulette.

Some of the tips are quite simple – for example: to get to a human on BT’s call centre line just push *0 at each option that comes up. Others are more ingenious and involve secret numbers or asking for particular people.

More than that though, GetHuman gives fed-up customers a place to rate and compare customer service across all the big companies. That helps to reward the companies doing it well, and show up the ones doing it badly.

You can add your feedback on the call centre too – how long did you have to wait? Was the service useful or not useful? You can add positive feedback about individuals as well – rewarding the people who are genuinely useful.

One BT customer writes:

“Engineer Neil King 601496…..Engineer most helpful and patient in resolving my Broadband problem.”

There’s even a contact number for Facebook (!) but apparently the average wait is 291 minutes and once you do get through, the service is “horrible”…

They explain their mission:

“The GetHuman movement has been created from the voices of millions of consumers who want to be treated with dignity when they contact a company for customer support.”

GetHuman’s list of objectives is pretty admirable too. They aim to:

– establish standards for customer care based on input from customers (not businesses)
– allow users to rate businesses for their customer service
– allow users to discuss customer service experiences
– allow users to share tips on how to contact help and receive better service

Good. Now I can moan somewhere other than Twitter when the Virgin Media broadband box fries out on me again.

[story from @saskialeach]