SACRAMENTO, CA - Struggling to get an answer from a live person when you call customer service?
A call for help has left many of us feeling trapped in an endless series of recorded questions and prompts. Now, you can connect to a real, live person with little or no waiting.
Check out the website GetHuman.com. When you call the number listed for AT&T, it takes only 20 seconds before you connect to a real rep. The same GetHuman.com website gets companies to call you back so you don't have to sit on hold.
Here's another time saver.
Check out the "Fast Customer" app, which has 2,000 companies are listed there. Select the one you want. Then, go on about your own business. When the app connects with a real person, your phone rings.
Be sure to hit up bigger companies on Twitter too. Tweet your concern to the company's Twitter handle. A lot of them have customer service reps monitoring complaints.
RELATED STORY: 4 ways to bypass an automated recording
As for beating the wait when you're trying to leave a message- there's a way to bypass a lot of that too.
Every time you hear those automated instructions before the beep, it adds up, costing you minutes and money. According to one calculation, that robot voice made Verizon more than $560 million a year.
In some cases, you can beat the system by dialing pound to get straight to the beep. But it depends on your cellphone carrier.
"I think there should definitely be a way to make that format universal so that you can just hit a button instead of wasting that time and being charged for that," New York Times Technology columnist David Pogue said.
There are more ways to communicate now than ever. In some cases, it hasn't been so convenient. But finding a way to connect faster may just be a matter of finding the right shortcut.
By Suzanne Phan, sphan@news10.net
Twitter: @suzannephan
News10/KXTV