I Hate Automated Help Desks!

I have a new Virgin Mobile cell phone and I get text messages for ring tones 2-3 times a week. I don’t want to get them therefore I needed to tell Virgin Mobile to stop sending them to me. This seemed like a simple and reasonable request, right?

I immediately learn I am not Virgin Mobile's target market as my call to them is “answered” by an automated voice that sounds like a chirpy little teenager. The teen lists various options and I pick the closest one to my problem. This continues a couple more times until I tried to be smart and told the automated girl “Help”. She then cheerfully replied “Before I can help you I need to know a little more about your problem.” Great.

I randomly pick yet another option and then am faced with my fourth group of choices. Now I am starting to get really pissed off. So I begin to smash the “0” key on the hopes it might get me a real live person. Nope. Then I begin to scream “Help! Help! Help! I want to talk to somebody!” This finally gets the automated teen’s attention and she decides that maybe she can’t help me after all and will send me to a real live person. Hallelujah!

I finally get to speak to an honest to God person except that the perky computerized teen had more personality than my service rep. But I tell her my problem and ask if she can help me and she says “no”. That’s it. A little flustered I ask again if she could have Virgin Mobile stop sending me these annoying messages and again she simply states “No.” Now I am truly getting angry so I ask if I could speak to someone to complain and perhaps get a better answer. The next thing I know, that obnoxious teen is back on the line, this time to walk me through an automated customer survey!!

I brace myself to start it all over again. This time when that irritatingly chipper child answers the phone I immediately start yelling “Help! Help! Help!”. It didn’t make the process go any faster but it made me feel marginally better. I next randomly picked choices while continuously screaming for a real person. After about ten minutes of this the still cheerful teen finally catches on and sends me to a real person.

This time the customer service rep sounds human and even like an adult. Yeah! I tell her my problem and after checking out my service she discovers that I am not signed up for text message alerts. Apparently these are coming from an outside company and I need to contact them, not Virgin Mobile. {sigh}

Nonetheless I was still impressed with this rep and asked to speak to her manager to tell of my experience with both the good and the bad reps (not to forget the annoying teen). She then transfers me – right back to that damned teenager to go through their customer survey, again. AAAKKKK!!!! Ooops, I have to run now, I hear my cell phone beeping at me with another text message....