Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

That is another infuriating part of phone menus though. I am a busy person so I only resort to calling after exhausting online options. Then I have to listen to a bunch of menus and reminders about how I can do standard stuff like check my balance online. And I have to kind of “hack” my way to a real person who has the power to actually do something.

Sure, but some of us can only get Comcast.

The problem is that it's been replaced with either nothing or a help page that doesn't solve your problem.

I recently had a company email me saying:

> In this case, your review of___ has been flagged because we couldn’t verify its authenticity, and on that basis we’ve removed your review from our platform.

> While we’re confident that this is the right call, we appreciate that sometimes we get it wrong. If you think there’s been a mistake here, please do let us know by replying to this email and a member of our Content Integrity Team will review this decision with you.

What happens when you reply to that email as instructed?

> Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, this email address is not monitored and this is an automated reply.

Instead they direct you to some long ass form on their website asking about the URL of the review I'm contacting them about, which I have no idea (it was a response to a "how was your customer service experience, please rate us), and I'm not going to spend my time trying to find where it was. The whole experience was by email, I don't know if it even has a URL, but it's a required field on the form.

The original email thread that they told me to reply to should have all the information they need, but instead of even generating a link that pre-fills it into the contact form, they just throw all the context away and say "go to our website and fill out the form" because my time is worth nothing to them.

The extra irony is that I would complain to them about their service doing this, but there's no way to contact anyone useful with feedback.

Honestly I assume it's all on purpose because if I bothered to fill out the form it would cost them 5 minutes of someone's time to have them review it.

Not out of the blue. We ran a call center and even 10 years ago, the writing was on the wall for phone support. Average time to resolution for comparable issues was 3x longer over the phone, was overwhelmingly popular for older generations (read: very unpopular for millennials), and the call infrastructure was a constant misery. It’s no surprise that businesses are winding it down because on the other side, chat and email are so much easier from the business’s perspective.

I have a problem with one of my stock broker accounts-it has the wrong address on it. It is my old address I lived at years ago, before I opened this particular account-I never set it, but I think it somehow got stuck deep in their computer systems from one of my other accounts and got applied to this new account when I opened it. Anyway, go to the website, I see the wrong address - yet click the “edit” button to change it, and the edit screen has the right one, and won’t let me change it to the right one because it is already set.

I call up the call centre - agent says he can see the same problem but he doesn’t have access to do anything about it. He told me to print out a paper change of address form to change my address from my current address to my current address, sign it, scan it (he emphasised it had to be signed pen to paper, and the form even says that), and email it in. I’m hoping that fixes it.