"Unscrewed" offers tips on how consumers can fight back. (AP Photo/HO/Ten Speed Press)
Ron Burley offers tips on avoiding the "cattle chute" of customer service call centers.

Stuck in an endless loop of customer service voicemail? Try calling the sales department instead.

Spent months trying to get a bad $200 charge off your cell phone bill? Buy stock in the company and lodge your complaint as a shareholder. You'd be surprised how quickly the folks at "investor relations" will jump on your complaint.

So says consumer advocate Ron Burley, who offers these and other tips in his new book "Unscrewed: The Consumer's Guide to Getting What You Paid For."

"It used to be when you called customer service that you could reasonably expect to get your situation straightened out," he says.

That was then. While some firms still offer excellent customer service, too many now shunt consumers to subcontracted call centers, where "really the goal is to give you as little as possible and make you go away as quickly as possible," he says.

So how do you make yourself heard? Burley's tips include:

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NAME, RANK, SERIAL NUMBER

"One of the first things you need to do when you call is: Get the information about the person you're speaking with, because the first thing they always ask you when you call back is ... 'Who did you talk to?'," he says.

That means getting the representative's name, department, agent number, where they are geographically -- really any information possible -- so you can create a record of your dealings with the firm.

Getting identifying information also helps make the representative have more of a stake in resolving your inquiry -- because they know you might possibly report them if you aren't satisfied. Burley says this implied threat is especially effective when dealing with government officials, such as at the IRS.

CALL THE SALES DEPARTMENT

If customer service is unhelpful, call the sales department because "they're the ones who actually care about the bottom line," Burley says. "Sales departments generally have a totally separate phone number. That's the phone number in the ad ... when they want to sell you a new product. You call the sales department and they're more than happy to talk with you because they think you want to spend more money with them."

"MR. OR MS. STOCKHOLDER"

If calling the sales department doesn't work either, Burley's book offers an array of tips. Among them is one he calls "Mr. Stockholder." He says he just used it to help a friend -- OK, it was his literary agent -- get a $200 erroneous charge off her cell phone bill.

"For five months she'd been trying to dispute this charge and getting nowhere," he says. So, Burley went online and bought 10 shares in the cell phone company. As a stockholder, he called the company's investor relations line with his complaint and said he would speak his mind at the next stockholders' meeting.

"The last thing a corporation wants is some small-time stockholder showing up in the middle of their well-choreographed annual meeting and creating some doubt about how they're treating their customers," he says. "If you knock the stock price of a corporation down by one penny, they could lose millions."

The tactic worked, he says. The bad $200 charge was knocked off his agent's bill immediately. He then sold the stock that afternoon -- for a $6 profit.

BE RIGHT

All of these tips work on the principle that you are in the right. The point isn't to try to shake down a company, Burley says. "You're only in it to get what you paid for, what you deserve."

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Stephanie Hoo is asap's business writer.

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