Remember the days when you could get a customer-service rep on the phone...or even better, just walk into one of their offices and deal face-to-face?

Them days is long gone.

It's perfectly logical from a business dollars-&-cents perspective, though. For service businesses primarily, employee cost is the biggest category of costs by far. Lowering them pays off big in terms of enhanced profits and the capital to self-finance company growth.

And so we get the inevitable. Closing branch offices and centalizing because of lower costs of communication. Then we got those horrendous voicemail-hell, answering-system trees, which the Urban Dictionary defines as:

When accessing a voice mail phone answering system, one becomes lost, going down the wrong path or getting stuck in a loop, unable to get pertinent information or leave a message with the appropriate party.

Those have actually become better in the last decade with voice recognition and AI tech. Some are downright good when they prompt you to just say what you're trying to do and they place you in the right, or close to the right, place.

Then you have trouble or support tickets. Now, I deal with a few companies and their support is fantastic. Quick and pertinent. And often, chat is available and that usually provides me a way to sort of casually get an issue resolved right on the spot and I can be doing other things whilst the guy or gal is off investigating.

But this story is about when it goes awful. Read on.