Press 0 to Speak to a Human

There was a time when being angry with customer service at least meant someone had to listen to you.
You called. Someone answered. You explained what happened, sometimes calmly, sometimes after you had lost your patience. The person on the other end might not solve the problem immediately, but at least somebody heard it.
Today, increasingly, nobody does. Call a service provider and you are welcomed by a recorded voice. Press one. Press two. Enter your account number. Then comes the link to a website, an app or a chatbot.
You type your problem.
“I understand your concern”, it replies.
Except, of course, it doesn't.
Whether it is electricity, water, telecommunications, banking or deliveries, getting through to an actual person can sometimes feel like completing an obstacle course. And perhaps there is a bigger problem here than inconvenience. It is much easier to avoid responsibility when nobody has to hear the frustration on the other end.
A family without water becomes a ticket. An internet connection that has been down all day becomes a reference number. Money that has disappeared becomes a case marked “pending”.
There is no anger in a case number. There is no urgency in a ticket. The system doesn't hear the exhaustion in your voice. It doesn't understand that what may be a routine technical problem to a company might be an emergency to you.
So we learn to behave differently too.
We stop getting angry because there is nobody to get angry with. We choose the nearest category from a menu even when none describes our problem. We shorten complicated stories into tiny chat boxes.
Perhaps, while we are busy teaching machines how to behave like humans, machines are quietly teaching us how to behave like them.
File the complaint. Get the number. Wait.
Maybe this will change. AI is improving quickly. Customer service systems may eventually become extraordinarily good at understanding what we need. Perhaps one day we will wonder why we ever spent 20 minutes waiting for someone to answer a telephone.
I hope so.
Because right now, technology seems good enough to remove the human being, but not quite good enough to replace what that human being gave us.
Sometimes that wasn't even a solution.
Sometimes it was simply knowing that somebody had listened.
So perhaps companies should keep one old-fashioned option somewhere in that increasingly clever menu: Press 0 to speak to a human.
What has been your most frustrating experience with modern customer service? Are we already living in the future, or should we brace ourselves for what comes next?