How To Save and Dial Phone Extension

I believe every iPhone user should know how to save a phone number in Contacts. That's trivial. But how about a phone number with an extension number? Do you know how you can save phone extension in Contacts?

Increasingly, businesses are using automated menus to answer customer phone calls. It's not uncommon you hear a mechanical voice prompting you with instructions like:

Banking services, please press 1.
Credit card services, please press 2.
Insurance services, please press 3.
If you need to talk to our customer service office directly, press 8.

Sound familiar to you, right? You need to input appropriate extension to select the corresponding option. Sometimes, you even need to key in several inputs before you can reach the right service. That's really annoying. Is there any way to save these key sequences in contact so you don't have to dial them again and again?

If you don't know how to do so, you probably miss a key feature for saving contact on iPhone. When entering a phone number with the numeric keypad, there is a +*# button. After tapping on the button, it'll display a "Pause" button on keypad. This is a very handy button for saving phone extension for a contact.

Saving Phone Extension in Contacts

Let's say, your friend's office phone number is 123456789 with the extension number 7890. To save this phone number in Contacts, simply key in "123456789″ and press +*# button. Next, press the "pause" button and it displays as a comma in phone number. The "pause" instruction tells iPhone to add a friendly pause when dialing the number. Right after the comma, key in the phone extension 7890. That's it. Now when you call up your friend, iPhone dials the main number, pauses for a while and then it dials the extension automatically.

Saving Key Sequences when Dialing Customer Hotline

The same technique can also apply to customer hotline with an automated answering. By saving the sequence of keys to input, this can save you significant amount of time when dialing the hotline. For instance, when you call up the customer hotline (e.g. 8724-2332), you use to key in the following sequence in order to reaching the customer service office:

Press "2″ for Insurance —> Press "1″ for Life Insurance —> Press "8″ to talk to our customer service officer

To automatically dial the customer hotline and input the key sequence (2 -> 1 -> 8), you need to save the phone number as "87422332 ,2,1,8″. As mentioned earlier, the comma represents a friendly pause. When you dial the number, iPhone will automatically dial the main number, pause for a while and key in "2″ on behalf of you. Later, it pauses again and key in "1″. Then pause again and key in "8″ automatically.

It's a really nice feature that saves a significantly amount of time particularly when you have to call up the customer service hotline frequently. Try out this tip and let us know what you think.

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