When you call the customer service number for Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L), you're greeted by an automated message system. It first addresses you in English, then offers a Spanish language option with a pause to give those selecting this option sufficient time to do so. This is a great feature that increases caller accessibility.
After the pause, you're informed that the call may be monitored or recorded for quality purposes, and then asked to say in a few words what you need help with today. Personal opinion: I greatly dislike voice-activated messaging systems. In my experience, they rarely work well. With JCP&L's system, it doesn't immediately provide suggested options (which could be helpful by letting the caller know some of the words or phrases the system accepts); it simply asks how it can help. Considering how ineffective voice-activated messaging systems often seem to be, this is really frustrating.
As expected, the system didn't understand or accept my initial attempts to interact with it. Consequently, it gave me a few suggestions: "outage" and "account balance." It still didn't register what I was saying, so it offered further suggestions (at a rapid-fire pace, goodness) to verbally select:
If you don't make a selection, the system will keep offering different options. I called a few times (to make sure I got the above information correct) and was given different options each time, which is odd.
After a few failed attempts at interacting with the voice activation feature, I hung up and decided to navigate the website instead. I wish I had feedback on customer service, but honestly, I didn't receive any—just a robot that didn't understand me.