[hacker_9]

It's poor thinking on them to only provide a talking interface. I don't think I've encountered that personally, there is always a way to use the keypad - which I will always use anyway, even though they understand my voice, it's just x10 faster. And if you've made the call before you can type on the keypad before the robot on the other side is done talking.

[tiagod]

There's plenty of services in Portugal that only have the damned robots. They're also adding the most infuriating chatbots that they pretty much force you to go through before getting to a human. Can't wait for the day this is all banned.

[Dudeman112]

Whenever this is discussed, it always makes me wonder... Why? Just why?

SURELY just adding an option to use the damn textual "pick 1 for Blah, 2 for bleh..." would take no effort at all?

[monkpit]

You also have to consider - does the company you are calling BENEFIT from you hanging up in anger/frustration? Many times the answer is yes.

[Dudeman112]

Most of the time the answer long term is "no" because as long as it's not a monopoly people will go to their competitors that aren't utter shite at what they do

[allgreed]

But there are cases where the interacting with company which engages in said practices is due to a transitive relationship.

Example: My preferred clothing vendor uses a certain of delivery company.

If I, personally, am sending a package then switching the delivery company is usually trivial. Switching clothing vendor because UPS has crappy international package management and you need to say the package id instead of typing it would hurt me more than it would hurt them.

And the other shipping companies aren’t much better anyway. And afaik there isn’t much incentive for trading off something in exchange for pissing parcels receivers less, because see above.

On the other hand, there are great shipping companies, end user experiance-wise. One I can think of is a polish automated pickup station company. Somehow the experience (including customer support in case of a stuck door, etc.) only gets better with time so far. But they were the first and afaik remain the only company in the automated pickup station space that counts in Poland.

[monkpit]

I think the number of people who would actually do this is smaller than you think.

[pintxo]

Depends, if your only option to cancel is via phone or chat-bot.

[tiagod]

I had to cancel a service via fax... in 2023...

[passwordoops]

I don't have data but more and more seem to be turning voice only. Some US-based airlines come to mind, and one of the banks I deal with. It's fun when they ask for my "16 to 20 digit client number"

[Pxtl]

And then they spend half a minute slowly reading back each digit to ask "is this correct?"

[wrycoder]

Mine just started introducing an ad before they get to the main menu.

Also, they repeat things several times during the interaction. i.e. the phone number I just called.

“Do you want to repeat that or go to the main menu?”

“Main menu.”

“You want to go to the main menu, is that right?”

It’s not my pronunciation, it does that every time.

Bot time is considered cheap, and therefore so is the user’s time. The time for the transaction has doubled over the last five years, as they add more repeats, information, and now, ads.