Direct phone number for the service provider's helpdesk, is that possible?

Hi There,

I was struggling with an issue and describe the problem to one of my friends. And after a couple of minutes we came up with the solution.

The problem

I wanted to have a solution for an annoying situation. When you try to call your service provider's hotline you need to cross several menu options, then enter your unique id just to have someone who might help you.

For example, the hotline number is this: 123456789, option 7  for problem report, option 2 for existing customer, then you need to enter your customer ID with a hash mark at the end e.g. 12345#. If you are sitting in a car you definitely don't want to do that, plus it's hard to remember the customer ID as you can have many different at different service providers.

Wouldn't it be great to have only one number, one contact on the contact list to call when you would need help from that service provider?

The solution

When I describe all these to my friend he told, that I could use a comma in the phone number to add pause and add the menu option and again a comma and the rest. As he told, when the phone dials the comma, it waits for two seconds and then dials the rest of the number.

Hm, then I thought this must be easy... Let's stick to our example, the phone number of my "magic" hotline contact would look like this:

123456789,7,2,12345#

I ran some tests and it turned out that the phone systems would need a bit more time, so more pause should be placed into the phone number. The final solution number looks like this:

123456789,,7,,2,,12345#

This worked beautifully. All these extra characters can be entered via the  normal keypad on any phone, and stored into a contact.

So now you can have your direct hotline phone number in your phone, and I hope this saves you some minutes and headaches :-)

Have a nice one!