Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask th…
At a hospital or clinic, it is common to be repeatedly asked your name and birthdate, even by the same nurse. It's not because they don't remember your birthdate. It's a procedural security measure in a busy, complicated environment to minimize how often they mistakenly hand you a bottle of someone else's pills. I imagine this might be similar.
I suspect the real answer is that when they finally hand you off to a live human being, that human is sitting in the boiler room of a third-tier contractor on a different continent than the main headquarters of the business, and they have no idea what you're currently looking at on your screen. It's technically possible to do this handoff with a complete picture of how the user got there, but that requires a degree of technical integration most companies don't seem to want to pay for.