Telephone Menus and the Elderly

Telephone Menus and the Elderly

By Jane D. Ogilvie

September 2008

Do you think businesses are the least bit aware of how difficult it is for older people to do business with their company when there are telephone menus to navigate? Do you think any businesses actually care? I’m not so sure they do. Maybe they’re not concerned about losing long time customers, and they’re just concerned about having “tech savvy”, younger ones.

Everyone’s heard jokes about having to listen to a recording and figure out what number to push for the most efficient way to get an answer you need. If it weren’t so pitiful, if it weren’t such a symptom of automation taking perfectly good jobs away from people, it might be really funny.

The automated menu is used by businesses and utilies that the elderly need to communicate with, so they can not be avoided. Should you be lucky enough to push the right combination of numbers, you may get hold of a human being. Once you do, you may have to go through another four or five people in various departments before you get your question answered. This is only if you’re lucky.

You are fortunate if it’s just a question you’re trying to get an answer to. Have you tried to resolve a billing issue recently? Have you tried to get your deceased grandmother’s name off of some old stock so it can be reissued by the second company that has bought it out since the original stock was received? Be prepared for disconnections and new human beings to talk to if you decide to brave it and call back. You must also have up to an extra hour of free time to get some of these kinds of situations handled.

Do the elderly consider whether they should use a land line or their cell phone before trying to do business on the phone? Be sure to Instruct your mom or grandmom not to use their cell phone (if they have one) unless they truly have unlimited calling minutes. If they do have an abundance of minutes to talk, remind them they should have a fully charged phone. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be for them to get to customer service person #3 only to have their cell phone go dead? Same is true for radio phones. Make sure you remind them to have them fully charged too!

I’m sure everyone reading this has “been there and done that”. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me. Nobody has asked me though, and obviously, nobody has asked the elderly if they find these menus to be a time saving, effective means of transacting business.

I wonder if any of these companies or utilities corporations have sat with their grandparents while they tried to find out how to discontinue a service that they somehow had been inadvertently signed up for? Do these people consider that a lot of older people do not use computers and that’s why they’re on the telephone trying to work things out?

Have you called a business and been told, “You can do this online”? Hello. There are a lot of productive older people still paying taxes who don’t use computers! Can you imagine how angry your dad or grandfather would be to hear some young whipper snapper tell him he could “…do this online”? My dad, a successful businessman, would explode if somebody told him that- especially if it took him 15 minutes to get through the telephone menu. In fact, I don’t know how he’s withstood all of the disrespect that has been offered up to him trying to do routine business over the phone in this “promising” new millennium as we heard it described 8 years ago.

Don’t businesses want customers to call? Do they really want there to be no direct human communication? Is indirect communication with the person reading a typed in “send a message” statement the best we’ll be able to do in the future?

In an article posted by Keith Kilty "Targeting the Elderly" the difficulty of getting to a real person to answer a question over the telephone is mentioned in the last paragraph. Other examples of how telemarketing schemes are targeting the elderly, disabled, and most financially challenged are given. Mr. Kilty references another article found on May 20, 2007, "Bilking the Elderly" that was written by Charles Duhigg of the New York Times.

Do these business wizards realize how hard it is to understand the person on the other end of the phone? This is a problem that really ticks off people of all ages. Hearing loss happens to some degree to all of us as we age. This only adds to the burden of trying to communicate. Customer service agents often talk fast and have an attitude as if you should understand exactly what they’re saying. They get perturbed when you don’t and you ask another question.

Some use jargon that only a person of their genre understands. I’m sure their supervisors point this out to them since most “lines are recorded in order to improve customer service”. Not! I’ll pretend I’m hip and use a little “text talk” here by writing LOL. If you’re a baby boomer by now you might have learned what LOL means. Have you taught your parents or grandparents this new language though? Probably not.

All I’m saying is that communicating for the elderly customer is even more difficult than it is for the rest of us. It would be nice as our population becomes elderly heavy, if businesses could take a serious look at how to do business with people who are aging.

Doing so would not only make life easier for an aging population, but might even create some new jobs, (which I hear are in demand across the country these days). Businesses could earn serious kudos by using older, experienced workers with old-fashioned work ethics to review and resolve these non-productive methods of doing business. What a novel idea. Help supplement often meager fixed incomes of the elderly by offering them jobs to help other older people!