I hate those, too. Especially when others are around.
The interface is so inconsistent between different implementations that they're always terribly awkward to navigate at best, and completely infuriating at worst. I don't like presenting the image of an progressively-angrier man who is standing around and speaking incongruous short phrases that are clearly directed towards nobody at all.
But I've found that many of them still accept DTMF. Just mash a button instead of utter a response, and a more-traditional IVR tree shows up with a spoken list of enumerated options. Things get a lot better after that.
Like pushing buttons at the gas pump to try to silence the ad-roll, it's pretty low-cost to try.
The interface is so inconsistent between different implementations that they're always terribly awkward to navigate at best, and completely infuriating at worst. I don't like presenting the image of an progressively-angrier man who is standing around and speaking incongruous short phrases that are clearly directed towards nobody at all.
But I've found that many of them still accept DTMF. Just mash a button instead of utter a response, and a more-traditional IVR tree shows up with a spoken list of enumerated options. Things get a lot better after that.
Like pushing buttons at the gas pump to try to silence the ad-roll, it's pretty low-cost to try.