We’ve all been there. Something goes wrong, so you call customer service. What answers is a bizarre, arcane mess of an answering machine where you have to puzzle out exactly how company x categorizes customer issues when all you want is to talk to a human being. Saying “Complaint” cuts through all of that, but you might need to wait on hold for a bit. Just make sure you’re nice to the person on the other end.
The company I used to work for you could say “agent” or press 0, but you had to do it many times because it would keep trying to make you play along. At the start of Covid in 2020, the call centers were totally overwhelmed, so someone decided to change that path to say “sorry, I don’t know what you want, goodbye” and hang up.
Surprisingly, that change caused a marginal reduction in call volume, which was the goal. So, when the call centers stabilized later in the year, Finance balked at any suggestion that the decision be reversed unless someone came up with an idea to offset the cost of the increase in volume it would cause. It stayed like that for 2-3 years and was still very controversial when it was finally put back to the way it was before Covid.
I just had to do this with FedEx. At my old job, I used to call FedEx 2-3 times a week to get assistance over production stopping shortages for a medical device company. I used to have to say agent about 3 times and it would go through. I no longer work that job, and a few years have passed. I had a very urgent FedEx item that I needed to talk to a person about. I said agent, representative, human probably 10-15 times. It eventually told me it couldn’t understand and hung up. I was fucking heated because I know it used to work and they took that feature away!