Wait, people would just call somewhere and say the extension? That sounds awfully rude to me. Wouldn't you normally say, "Hi, can I have extension 432, please?"
It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human being.
What it reminded me of is when, after waiting on hold forever, the CSR says something like: "Thanks for calling ABC Company. What's your account number?" or "What is your phone number?" Having the first "words" a customer utters be numbers is probably not the best idea. I wonder how many hours of waiting on hold could be eliminated if more companies understood this phenomena.
I also wonder if the full word "hello," would be necessary, since the word "hi," makes the similar cavity-sound as the spoken number "five"?
With something like Twilio I don't think you have any excuse for this part of the interaction: play a recorded greeting saying "Hiya, for fastest service, type in your account number . If you don't know your account number, hit 0 and one of our operators can help you look it up." If you get their account number, pick the appropriate CSR, bring up the details directly on their screen, forward the call and drop them straight into "Thanks for calling FooCorp. This is Melinda. To whom am I speaking please?" Hears customer name, a necessary formality because many accounts have multiple people in charge of them -- the most common situation in B2C is husband and wife. "Thanks for calling Mr. Smith. What can I help you with?" If Mr. Smith says his last order didn't ship yet, Melinda is a single keystroke away from pulling it up.
Ooh, the possibilities with Twilio make me giddy. If I can only productize one of them... (Crikey, the possibilities for per-company customization are endless. Do customers ever call you? You should be using Twilio.)
How hard would it be to manufacture a little device that plugged into the phone line (or just listened with a built-in microphone) and displayed the digits/dial-tones coming over the line on a seven-segment display? Then the CSR could just ask you to dial your information in, then read it and use it as normal.
I've never encountered an operator who takes extension numbers rather than names, but I'd say, for example: "Mark Thompson, please" without thinking it's rude (as long as I didn't know the operator). You gotta "make the nice" somewhere though :-)
It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human being.