Or press 9 if you have died

My mother died a few weeks ago. As a result I’m having to contact a lot of organisations to tell them about it. This means I have had more than my fair share of phone menu system navigation.

I’ve realised through this that almost all companies, except some insurance companies, have completely neglected to cater for this possibility in their phone user interfaces. Typically calling a financial organisation you do not get to talk to a human or get an option to select to talk to one, in the interest of saving money and filtering “timewasters”.

Typical phone menu for a bank or similar:

Step 1: Listen to a long message, often including “Please note that if you are not the account holder we will not be able to discuss the account with you”. That’s encouraging.

Step 2: Enter your account number (enter account number of dead person here)

Step 3 [on some systems]: Enter your date of birth or other security info

Step 4: A list of typical options:

• Press 1 for statements/financial stuff
• Press 2 to make a payment
• Press 3 to report a card stolen

That’s it. So if you make it past step 3 – by lying and using the deceased’s details if you have them – at step 4 you are left with no relevant option, and typically no option to “speak to a representative”.

Your only choice is to just press any button and wait for a response. “Sorry I didn’t understand that, Press 1 for ….” and there you go again. Pressing # sometimes helps… most of these systems do offer some way out after your first or second error and eventually put you through to a human, but this is after a lot of frustration and time wasting – think about doing this 6 times in succession with different phone systems and different banks. The worst are the ones where you have to speak your option. “GIVE ME A HUMAN NOW BEFORE I…”

Phone system creators take note: a loved one has died and we have a mountain of paperwork to sort out. We do not have time for such pathetic usability in the interests of stopping human customers talking to your human staff.

Given that a lot of people, at least this side of Olympia, do die and that financial instutions need to be told, you’d think that the numbskulls that put together these phone menu systems would factor in the “Press 9 to report the death of an account holder” feature.

It was very refreshing to find that at least one insurance company had this feature at the very top level of their menu. Amen!