Inconsiderate call center IVR system

I get very angry with call centers that ask me to press many buttons before I could speak to the staff.

I had, all along, thought that the buttons were required to divert the caller to the staff handling the category of calls.

I was told recently that this is not the case. The calls are handled by the same group of staff. The buttons that I had to press was for the system to collect statistics.

I got very angry when I heard this explanation. How inconsiderate can the organization be? Just because they want to collect the statistics, they make the customers listen to many messages and press the buttons. Do they realize that it can be very stressful to the customer who has many things to attend to?

I also suspect that the statistics are not important to the organization. If they want to know how many people open an utility account or close an utility account, they do not need to ask the customer to provide this information in the call center IVR system. They have the statistics from their backend system.

How can we stop this inconsiderate behavior of the big organizations in Singapore? They include the government agencies, banks, telcos, and other big companies.

I wish that our MPs do not sleep in Parliament. They should be bringing up these issues to discuss in Parliament. I will write to my MP (Lee Hsien Loong) to ask him to bring it up.