Comment by sib
6 months ago
If you're asking seriously... Because, as the AI continues to improve, more and more users will choose not to fail out intentionally, reducing the required level of human staffing for a certain number of customers / orders. It's just like today - there are some users who will keeping "hitting 0" to get to a human, but many others who won't.
As a human who always hits 0 or bails out, I think this is yet to be proven. There are even products to help with this. If legislation is required to always provide a human for customer service, that can be done.
https://gethuman.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/apr/17/the-death-of-c...
As a (sometime) economist, if no one ever used the phone tree, companies would stop deploying them.
Actually what happens is companies just make it harder and harder to escape the phone tree.
People use the phone tree not because they want to, but because they have limited alternatives. Companies deploy them for line goes up ("how can we provide as little value as possible for as much profit as possible without the customer leaving"), not for the benefit of the customer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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You haven't backwards, the user of the phone tree software is the company deploying it. It exists for their benefit, not the customer's.
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