I spent forty-one minutes on hold last Tuesday. Not with a vendor. Not with the IRS. With a company I pay every month for a service I use every day. Forty-one minutes, four menu levels, two transfers, one disconnect, and a callback that never came.
Then I did what I always do. I pressed zero. Then zero again. Then I said "representative" into the phone like a man arguing with a toaster. And when a human finally picked up, she solved my problem in ninety seconds.
Ninety seconds. After forty-one minutes of being managed.
That's the whole thing right there. The problem was never hard. The company just built a moat around the person who could fix it.
Support Isn't Broken. It's Working Exactly as Designed.
People say customer service has gotten worse. It hasn't gotten worse. It's gotten optimized. There's a difference, and the difference matters.
Somewhere in every one of these companies is a spreadsheet with a line item called cost per contact. Every time a human being picks up a phone, that number goes up. Every time a chatbot deflects you, a knowledge-base article stalls you, or a menu tree loops you back to the main menu, that number goes down. The menu isn't there to route you. The menu is there to exhaust you.
Deflection is a metric. Somebody gets a bonus for it. That's not a conspiracy theory — it's on the slide.
They didn't fail to connect you to a human. They succeeded at not connecting you to a human.
I run a telecom company. I know exactly what the pitch deck looks like, because I've been in the room while somebody gave it. Automate tier one. Deflect sixty percent. Cut headcount by a third. The ROI math is gorgeous. It always is, because the math only counts the cost of answering. It never counts the cost of not answering.
The Number Nobody Puts on the Slide.
Here's what doesn't make the spreadsheet: the customer who spent forty-one minutes on hold and now tells the story at dinner. The one who doesn't call back at all and just quietly stops renewing. The one who was going to buy the bigger plan and decided he'd rather not be more entangled with you.
Churn shows up two quarters after the savings do. That's the trick. By the time the bill arrives, the guy who cut the support budget has been promoted, and the new guy inherits a retention problem nobody can trace back to a phone menu.
We answer our phones. Not because I'm a saint — because I've done the math the other way. A support call costs me money once. A customer who gives up on us costs me money forever. I'd rather eat the eight dollars.
Every hour a customer spends trying to reach you is an hour they spend reconsidering you.
The Bots Aren't the Problem. The Cowardice Is.
I'm not anti-automation. That would be a strange hill for me to die on. Automation is great at the stuff that's actually automatic — reset my password, tell me my balance, ship me a replacement, where's my order. If a bot can end my problem in twenty seconds, I don't need a human and I don't want one.
The sin isn't using a bot. The sin is using a bot as a bouncer.
You can feel the difference immediately. Good automation ends conversations. Bad automation prevents them. One is a tool. The other is a velvet rope with a chatbot standing behind it saying "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that" while your blood pressure climbs.
And the tell is always the same: no exit. A well-built system has a door. One press, one word, one click, and you're queued for a person. A cowardly system hides the door, buries it four levels deep, and then hangs up on you when you find it. That hangup isn't a bug. Somebody chose a timeout value.
Good automation ends conversations. Bad automation prevents them.
What It Actually Costs You.
There's a thing that happens after you've been through enough of these loops. You stop calling. Not just that company — anybody. You start treating every customer service interaction as a half-day project you have to schedule emotional energy for. You'll live with the broken thing rather than spend a Tuesday afternoon in a phone tree.
That's what all this deflection actually built. Not efficiency. A population of people who have quietly accepted that things will stay broken.
And once a customer accepts that you can't help them, you've lost something you can't win back with a survey. You know the survey. The one that fires the second the call ends, asking me to rate my experience one through five, from the company that just burned an hour of my life. I rate it. I always rate it. They never call about the rating.
Press Zero. Every Time.
So here's my policy, and I'm not flexible on it.
I press zero. I say representative. I hit the "existing customer, billing dispute" option because that's the one they always staff, because that's the one that touches revenue — and yes, that tells you everything about what a company actually values. I don't apologize to the person who picks up, and I'm never rude to them, because the person who picks up is not the one who built the maze. They're stuck in it with me, eight hours a day, getting yelled at for a decision made three floors up.
Be kind to the rep. Be relentless with the system.
And if you run a company — any company, any size — go call your own support line right now. Not the internal number. The one on your website, from a phone that isn't in your contact list. Time it. Count the presses. See how many minutes it takes to reach a person who can actually change something.
Whatever that number is, that's what your customers think you think of them. Mine better be under two minutes or somebody's getting an uncomfortable email.
Forty-one minutes for a ninety-second problem. Somebody got a bonus for that.