Blog: Pete Loshin

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Stop Talking to Machines!

The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.

Masochists may prefer navigating the endless and aggravating automated customer support systems, but sometimes you just want, no, NEED to talk to a human. Sure, those systems save businesses lots of money, both by deterring customers from getting what they paid for as well as by forcing the burden of performing customer service onto the customer.

But there are ways around most systems, and you can find the secret passphrases that get you a person at any of hundreds of businesses and government agencies, gethuman 500 database, a very nice little website that takes information collected from a variety of sources and turns it into nicely actionable knowledge that anyone with a web browser can use.

Of course, this is a long-overdue shot over the bow of corporations cutting customer service corners, and you can bet your bottom dollar that corporations will use the information in this database to help them "streamline" (that is, cut out customer short-cuts) customer service.

In the meantime, enjoy!

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