[jbay808]

At a hospital or clinic, it is common to be repeatedly asked your name and birthdate, even by the same nurse. It's not because they don't remember your birthdate. It's a procedural security measure in a busy, complicated environment to minimize how often they mistakenly hand you a bottle of someone else's pills.

I imagine this might be similar.

[dreamcompiler]

It's not. Hospital personnel do indeed ask you the same questions repeatedly to make sure they're treating the right person, but online vendors rarely have such high consequences attached to getting this wrong.

I suspect the real answer is that when they finally hand you off to a live human being, that human is sitting in the boiler room of a third-tier contractor on a different continent than the main headquarters of the business, and they have no idea what you're currently looking at on your screen. It's technically possible to do this handoff with a complete picture of how the user got there, but that requires a degree of technical integration most companies don't seem to want to pay for.

[drdaeman]

To be fair, in my experience they almost always tell explain the reasoning for repeatedly asking this information "for security reasons I must confirm your information again". Maybe I was just lucky with good places and people, but I never had wondered why the heck they need the information they already have on file (or worse, that I have already told them some minutes ago), because from their brief explanations I understand that they have some form and they must type in my data in there for verification.