Free tip for folks - this doesn't work every time (unfortunately), but sometimes just spamming and mashing numbers gets you to the operator faster than going through the stupid call tree. I guess it depends on how the default is set up in the software, Asterisk of whatever it would be. From my experience it seems you can either set up the call tree to restart from the root if you get out of its bounds or to default to some given option like the connection with a representative. To me this is easy enough to try every time so I just default to doing that. Sometimes the person on the other end will see you mashed in 60 numbers in the system I think and they will ask about it though. Easy enough in that case to politely ask them to relay to their boss that a customer though their system was too stupid to use and decided to short-circuit it like that. Not that anyone will care but still. :)
This almost always works, I think it's absolutely hilarious. Often the operator who picks up seems surprised I'm polite... I think it shows them a "this guy is really angry" warning sometimes.
Cursing helps sometimes, my spouse hates it. It doesn't always work as at least once I've had the machine chide me for cursing, it didn't accuse me just made it clear that request wasn't going through.
I usually just hit pound or asterisk repeatedly and get there, but lately some places must be wise to this because a few of them would say "unrecognized option, goodbye" and hangs up.
There's a few tricks you can use. Pressing "0" is one, you can also say "operator" in some obfuscated, line-impedence kind of way. Even if it appears your in a loop, you can usually just keep forging ahead with "operator" which will eventually break you out.
This reminds me that sometimes when the mashing of random numbers doesn't work, I'll repeat "OPERATOR! OPERATOR! OPERATOR!" at the machine until it yields. I guess it works by the same mechanism whereby the call audio is analyzed on the fly and if the algorithm determines the overlap with the corpus of terms at which it was trained is too low it will connect you to a human. Creepy if that's the case though.
I tried the repeat ‘operator’ approach and the bot just hung up on me. I think the gibberish appears mentally disabled so they’re worried about being sued for not being accessible to people with disabilities.
I've also had the experience of being hung up on by a robot as well for repeatedly asking for the operator. Because I'm definitely going to be in a better mood once I reach a human having been hung up on by a machine. Who thought that one up?!
On the other hand, maybe people on average are so grateful to reach a human that they're extra polite?
This often works but I think the bot companies are getting wise to it as I've run into a situation recently where doing this just put me in a never ending loop. The infernal machine refused to send me to a person no matter what amount of nonsense input I gave it.
I don't recall the company though. It was so infuriating I think I mostly blocked the memory.
