The Beavis and Butthead of Telecom

What 126 Minutes on the Phone with a Carrier Actually Looks Like

There are certain pillars of American culture that stand the test of time. Moby Dick. The Great Gatsby. The Godfather. And of course, Beavis and Butthead.

Heh heh heh.

For those who missed the 1990s, possibly because you were too busy being born, Beavis and Butthead was an animated series on MTV about two teenage burnouts who demonstrated that the human brain could function at surprisingly low levels of intelligence.

Now. Fast forward thirty years.

Beavis got a job as a customer service rep at a major telecom carrier. Butthead became the architect of telecom IVR systems, the malevolent automated phone trees that greet you when you call your carrier and randomly redirect you to the company’s Human Resources Department, the USPS hotline for lost packages, or possibly your local Star Wars cosplay club. (See! We got a Star Wars reference in!)

And that’s the problem.

So. Let’s say you’ve identified areas to optimize in your wireless expense, either the items we’ve already discussed or those still to come. You and your team, unfortunately, do not have a magic telecom wand to fix them. And relying on your Account Rep will get you there about 50% of the time. Here’s what your soon-to-be psychologically scarred team will have to deal with.

This is a real, unedited log from a recent interaction with a major telecom carrier. The task was simple. The outcome was not.

Heh heh heh.

Monday with Beavis

Called to request an auto port code. Worked with the customer service representative for 35 minutes. The rep spent much of that time trying to retain the account, despite being told repeatedly that we had already been working with the account team and the decision had been made. At the end of the call we were told it would take a couple of hours to complete, and that we would receive an email with the information when it was done.

The email never came.

Call time: 35 minutes. Progress: zero.

A Very Beavis and Butthead Tuesday

Called back and spent 35 minutes trying to get the customer service representative to understand what we were calling about. Once they did, they transferred us to the business porting department.

The transfer went to consumer porting.

Consumer porting transferred us to business porting. Business porting began the validation process.

And then disconnected us.

Call time: 41 minutes. Progress: zero.

Revenge of the Butthead IVR

Called back. The IVR system insisted on trying to port in a number. When we said no, it hung up.

Call time: 4 minutes. Progress: zero.

Beavis Transfers to Beavis Who Transfers to Butthead Who Transfers to Beavis

Called back to main customer service and asked to be transferred to business porting.

Transferred to consumer porting.

Consumer porting transferred us to business customer service, not business porting.

Business customer service transferred us to business porting.

Business porting said they could not help and we needed to be transferred to a specialist.

After 2 minutes: disconnected.

The representative called back. After 46 total minutes we reached the right person — Natalie.

Call time: 46 minutes. Progress: pending.

Natalie

Natalie was excellent. She pulled up the account, reviewed the history, and told us that she could not see that anything had been done from Monday’s call, and that the representatives we had spoken with would not have been authorized to do what was needed in the first place.

She walked us through how to submit the request via secure messaging. Clear. Efficient. Helpful.

Time with Natalie: 5 minutes.

Let that land for a moment.

121 minutes to reach the right person. 5 minutes to actually get something done.

126 Minutes

Total call time across two days: 126 minutes. For one port code.

Now zoom out.

Your team isn’t making one call to a carrier this year. They’re making dozens: rate plan changes, device activations, line disconnections, billing disputes, international plan setups, zero-usage device removals. Every one of those interactions has its own version of Monday and Tuesday. Its own consumer-to-business-to-consumer carousel. Its own IVR that hangs up when you say no. Its own 85-minute search for Natalie.

What does that cost in employee time? In lost productivity? In the quiet organizational tax of having capable people sitting on hold instead of doing their actual jobs?

Nobody puts that number in their telecom budget. They should.

Incompetent or Evil?

Consider the IVR that terminated the call when the answer was “no.” A system so precisely calibrated to frustrate that it hangs up rather than route a customer who declines a prompt. Was that designed? Or did it just happen?

Consider the representative on Monday who spent 35 minutes trying to retain an account that had already been handled, and then told us the work was done when it hadn’t been started.

Consider the three transfers that went to the wrong place before reaching the right one. A routing system so broken that consumer porting, business porting, and business customer service are functionally indistinguishable until you’ve already wasted 20 minutes finding out which one you’re on.

And consider that Natalie, the right person with the right access and the right answer, was five minutes away the entire time.

Incompetent or evil. Does it even matter?

Should We Work Together?

Hi, I’m Rick Friedman, CEO of Anilix. This blog is my attempt to pull back the curtain on an industry that has made a science out of overcharging the companies that can least afford the distraction.

When I’m not writing, I run Anilix, a telecom cost reduction firm I co-founded in 1998. We work with companies large and small across every category of telecom spend: mobile, voice, data, and everything in between. We work on a contingency fee basis. That means no upfront cost, no retainer, and no invoice from us unless we save you money first.

If any of this sounds familiar, the invoices that never quite make sense, the rates you suspect aren’t optimal, the team that’s too busy keeping the lights on to audit invoices, let’s talk. A 30-minute call costs you nothing and usually tells us both everything we need to know.