When in doubt, press 0

One of the greater failures in the implementation of customer service is the phone maze. Many are either very difficult to navigate or extremely tedious and time consuming. The very fact that you are forced to go through the phone maze should be your first clue that your company is not service-oriented.

If your goal is to talk to a human as soon as possible, you do have options. When in doubt, press 0 (the zero key). Most voice systems will send you directly to a human. If this doesn't work, you just received your second clue that your company doesn't give a hoot about customer service.

There are also websites like gethuman which can give you the specific sequence of keys to press in order to bypass the phone maze for a variety of companies and services.