[cutchin]

The methods might be a bit more sophisticated now, but this has been going on for many years now.

A single call center may take calls for hundreds of consumer retail products, but if you call the 800 number for your high annual fee, high-balance card, you will absolutely be higher in priority than people who called about their pre-paid starter credit card. Asking for an operator won't change that.

More recently, the last 15-20 years or so, it became much more common for a "data dip" to happen when you call, or when data is provided, so the system can look you up and make intelligent routing decisions. If you've called before with a particular phone number, there's a decent chance the system already knows who you are and will prioritize you accordingly unless you provide account numbers suggesting otherwise.

Call centers (whether in-house or farmed out) are high-volume, low-margin enterprises. Everyone is frustrated dealing with them, and they prioritize reducing that frustration for high-value customers. It's definitely unfair at times (an errant $500 charge that would be trivial for someone rich could be devastating for someone poor, but the rich person's call will be taken first) but that's just how the business is.