> They could do a better job of separating the two.
When support is purely viewed as a cost, then this will never happen. 99% plus of your call volume may be for the obvious things. If you offer two options all of those people are going to be more confused than they already are and you will have some of them engaged by costly humans.
> Unfortunately it seems call centres are driven by very traditional metrics which wouldnt lead anybody to set up a system like this.
You are getting to the higher level point here. Costs need to be minimized so you go with the cheapest vendor available and then try to squeeze everything you can out of that. If you can send someone to an AI, again, after you've put them in the direct of a human, there is the possibility of deflecting further cost. Depending on the scenario these cost savings can rack up for both the company and the support vendor. All the time, the humans doing the support or creating the solutions forming the basis of the AI get treated pretty poorly.
Support at a particular scale will start to skew this way unless there are strong forcing functions in the organization. For example, sales need to be able able to sell support which needs to be backed up by solid people, and keep getting renewed. If you offer predominantly free support then you don't have much wiggle room. When PMs and devs only focus on new features and not fixing real issues raised by customers, or more importantly in many ways, proactively identified by support people, then you lose support people and make toil for those remaining.
Lastly, recognizing support people as an asset, will result in better behaviors and attracting more talent. Many times companies struggle badly with this and then decide to just outsource it. Promoting people from support into sales or deeper tech roles over the long-temr can also be pretty cost effective versus hiring outside. Many folks on HN will have done support at one point and felt they could have contributed much more in other roles.