Halifax Telephone banking and spoken zero or oh

I agree, but it's probably a hangover from the old phone dials, where finger hole positions 6 and 7 were "MN" and "PRS", and "O" was not in its usual place in the alphabet. Position 0 (the 10th finger hole) was used for letter "O" (and "Q"). It was also used for calling the operator, so "0" and "O" became synonymous.

I needed to call british gas 5 times today, at a certain point of negotiating through the IVR it asks for the account number entered on the keypad, on every occasion it failed first time and was recognised on the second attempt, then after 15-30 minutes of dreadful hold music, the first thing the person you get through to asks for the same number again!

on 28/02/2022, Andy Burns supposed :

I have had that numerous times, with numerous companies. They all seem to do it. I thought the idea was it could bring up your account the instant you get through.

OTOH, I was impressed when the android at HMRC fully understood the alphabetic characters I needed to convey when I used the NATO alphabet.

Chris

On 28 Feb 2022, Harry Bloomfield Esq wrote

Perhaps it's a way to make sure that when customers finally get through to the call-centre bod, they'll have the account number at hand.

I can well imagine some people who would call in; get through; be asked for their account number; and only then start searching through piles of unsorted paperwork to see if they can find it.

(It would be the same sort that only begin to start looking for their card or cash after all their groceries have been scanned at the till....)

Not very successful, once I've entered the account number, and am left on hold, I tend to feel free to wander around with the phone on speaker, so if they put a human on, I'm no longer sitting at a desk with the paperwork in front of me, so then they have to wait for me to go back upstairs again.

HVS wrote on 28/02/2022 :

That 'sort' being the females of the human species?

A pretty crap excuse, though, given that most accounts will also include an address, something that most people can remember reliably

Bloody infuriating, isn?t it? I feel like refusing to give the details

Tim

Especially as they invariably bleat "Data Protection" if you grumble at them.

On 28 Feb 2022, Harry Bloomfield Esq wrote

Predominately, but not invariably -- it drives my wife up the wall as well.

British Gas try to be clever and work out who you are from your caller ID. Unfortunately they had my number attached to the wrong account, so I got the wrong values for my balance and insisted that my gas meter had four digits instead of five. Before I got it sorted, I had to precede their number with 141 so they had to ask me my account number.

I've also had problems with telephone banking and other sites which use voice recognition, when spelling words or other groups of letters (eg postcode), because it mis-hears letters which sound similar. Fair enough: I resort to the phonetic alphabet. But the voice recognition hasn't been programmed to understand the phonetic alphabet which was designed for this very purpose. Mind you, quite a lot of human operators on those phone lines don't understand either: you give a postcode as normal letters, they mis-hear, you give the phonetic equivalent, there is the audible equivalent of a blank stare of incomprehension, and you have to think of a word that they *will* know which starts with the same letter. I even had one really thick woman who didn't understand Yankee Oscar, so I tried Yellow Orange and she retorted "uh? but oranges aren't yellow".

Some seem to think that Sierra begins with a C (See-aira I suppose.)

The worst is when someone reads a word or postcode back to you and *doesn't* use the correct, standard words. I can mentally translate "sierra" into S without thinking, but translating "sausage" or "Simon" requires thought, and throws me off balance. I've also had people who think that "Uniform" is a letter Y ;-) I suppose it was not the best word to use: "Under" would have been a better choice because it starts with the sound of the letter being communicated.

Same here, my caller ID (either mobile or home phone does not correspond to dad's caller ID which seems to be what they have associated with the gas account at his house, I have taken over the account, but not bothered registering on line for it, they send paper bills which is better for me).

The funniest example I remember was someone reading back a software unlock code to a young lady with one letter being phrased as "Y for Wanky" ...

Yes, I've come across this with these weird automatic systems. Mind you should you really be putting the code here?

I also find that on long numbers if you have to look it up half way through the system times out and returns to the start. Another foible is that any noises in the room will create a digit. My feeling on them is to steer clear of telephone banking unless you can get a real human who can speak and hear English and who does not seem to live in outer mongolia via a tin can and string. Brian