When you call most companies today, you get a complex "IVR" (menu with speech or touch-tone commands.) In many cases the IVR offers you a variety of customer service functions which can be done far more easily on the web site. And indeed, the prompts usually tell you to visit the web site to do such things.

However, have we all not shouted, "I am already at your damned web site, I would not be calling you to do those things!"

And they should know this. So if you're on the web site, and you've done more than just click on the "Contact Us" tab, then when you finally do click on the tab asking for a phone number, you should not get the same phone number that is given to newcomers or printed in non-web locations.

You should get a special phone number that says, "This customer is already on the web site. Don't bother offering things that can be done far more easily on the web site."

Now I understand why they offer these things. Agents cost money and they want to divert customers to automated systems if at all possible. But If I'm already at the automated system, I am usually calling for just a few reasons. Perhaps I want web site support, but I probably need an agent to do something that's hard or impossible to do on the web site. Why frustrate me?

Of course, even better is if you have an eCRM system that integrates the call center and the web experience. Many companies now have a click-to-call link on their page. Some even connect you with an agent who has your information already from the history on the web site, but this is annoyingly rare. All this stuff is expensive and involves buying new tools and fancy reprogramming. What I propose is pretty trivial -- a much simpler menu gated by the phone number the person came in on. Any IVR can do that with a small amount of work.

Now I see one hole. The "Gets to an agent fast" number might of course be spread around, and people would want to use it for all their calls, defeating (to the company) the purpose of all those menus. But today, numbers are cheap. You can get a block of 100 numbers and change the magic one every day. Or, with a little bit of programming, really not that much, you can have the web site tell the true web-sourced callers "Dial extension xxxx when you get connected." That's a little fancier, requires the IVR be programmed to know about a changing extension, but again it's not nearly so hard as buying a whole eCRM system.

I know that companies don't want to frustrate their customers, they think the IVRs are saving them enough money to offset the frustration. But in this case, they are costing money, as the person wastes time listening to a pointles s IVR. Let's stop it!