[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...