The problem: I have an international phone number as I no longer live in Canada. Fortunately I was able to set up this number for account verification, but unfortunately I cannot request a call to this number or use it to verify my account on the automated telephone help system as it only accepts 10 digit numbers as valid and my international number is 11 digits. I spent the last hour trying as many different contact methods as I could find and could not get past this obstacle or gain access to talk to a human. To book an appointment, I ended up putting a Canadian friends contact down (so that they could pass along my real number to the human), but they missed the call and I had to stay up in the middle of the night (12h time difference) for nothing because Turbo tax couldn't contact me directly because of one extra digit in my phone number and a system that doesn't account for user variation.
Solutions to consider: There needs to be a way to bypass the automated chat bots when they are not able to resolve an issue. It would also help if clients could leave a simple note when they book an appointment so they could manually overwrite issues like this (i.e. I could put a Canadian number that I do not have access to in the mandatory telephone number section and then my actual number or my email in the note). Once assigned to an agent for an appointment, Turbo tax could also consider listing the extension to contact the assigned agent rather than the generic turbo tax number. Or perhaps consider opening a temporary live chat during the call time so that the agent and client can trouble shoot together, human-to-human, should any problems connecting arise.
The automated chat bot on the phone was excruciating and needs an update. I wanted to scream, cry, throw my devices at the wall... I just want to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a country that I don't receive any benefits from anymore, why is that so hard to do. D'x
