Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

You know that feeling. Your flight got cancelled. Your package arrived damaged. Your subscription renewed without permission. So you call customer service with a simple question and instead of talking to someone, you're greeted by a robotic voice asking you to say your account number, or navigate a phone tree with seventeen options, none of which match your actual problem.

Forty-five minutes later, you're still on hold.

This isn't accidental. This isn't a oversight. This is deliberate corporate strategy dressed up as "efficiency." And customers are absolutely fed up.

The Great Disappearing Act: Where Did All the Human Representatives Go?

Once upon a time, you could call a company and speak to someone within two minutes. That person had authority to solve your problem. They had training. They had a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.

Those days are gone, replaced by an ecosystem designed to discourage contact altogether.

A 2023 survey from J.D. Power found that average customer wait times increased by 32% compared to just three years prior. The average hold time for banking customers? Twenty-three minutes. For insurance companies? Thirty-eight minutes. And that's assuming you even reach the right department. Most people don't on the first try.

Airlines have become particularly shameless about this. Try calling United or American Airlines during peak hours. You'll get a recorded message suggesting you use their website instead. You'll hold for an hour. When someone finally picks up, they've been trained to offer solutions that benefit the airline, not you.

The irony? Companies spend billions on customer acquisition. Retaining existing customers costs a fraction of that. Yet they've somehow decided that making customer service deliberately miserable is worth the trade-off.

Why Chatbots Are Actually Making Things Worse

The latest weapon in the war against human interaction is artificial intelligence. Chatbots have invaded every platform—websites, apps, messaging services. And they're terrible.

Not because the technology is inherently flawed. They're terrible because companies deploy them with minimal training data and zero intention of escalating to humans. A chatbot can handle basic questions. Great. But when you have something even slightly unusual, they malfunction spectacularly.

I spent two hours with a bank's chatbot trying to report fraudulent charges. The chatbot kept asking me the same three questions in different variations. When I finally typed, "I need a human," it responded: "I understand you're frustrated. Let me help by explaining our fraud policy." Then it sent me a link to a FAQ page. The same FAQ I'd already read three times.

Some companies have gotten creative with their chatbot obstruction. They'll offer an option that says "Chat with an agent!" You click it. You wait ten minutes. The chat connects and it's... another bot, just formatted as a chat instead of a phone call.

What's maddening is that good customer service is still out there. Some companies—Costco, USAA, Zappos—still maintain live support lines where humans answer quickly and solve problems. These companies also tend to have exceptional customer loyalty. But somehow this lesson hasn't spread.

The Financial Incentive to Ignore You

Here's the uncomfortable truth: companies have run the math, and they've decided that bad customer service is profitable.

Think about it. If five percent of customers give up trying to reach support and just accept their problem, that's five percent of support costs eliminated. If you can discourage fifteen percent of complaints from even being filed, that's fifteen percent fewer refunds and escalations. The financial calculations are brutal.

Insurance companies are particularly good at this. They know that most people won't fight a denied claim if it requires more than ninety minutes of phone calls and paperwork. They're betting that the minority who do persist will cost less than improving their claims process.

Cell phone companies have mastered the strategy too. Want to cancel? Great! We have a special team for that. The hold time is mysteriously longer. When you connect, they'll offer you deals, which is nice, but what they're really doing is making cancellation as exhausting as possible. Some people genuinely give up and stay as customers just to avoid the phone call.

The pandemic accelerated this trend because companies cut customer service staff, temporarily. Temporary became permanent. The saved money went to shareholders and executives, and the eroded service infrastructure never came back.

What You Can Actually Do About This

The honest answer? Not much, individually. One angry customer complaint doesn't move the needle for a major corporation.

But collectively, we have more power than we think. Certain companies maintain good customer service specifically because their reputation depends on it. Certain industries are starting to face regulatory pressure around customer service accessibility. And most importantly, when a company treats you poorly, you don't have to stay.

Document everything. Screenshot hold times. Note exact wait durations. When you finally reach someone, ask for a case number. Tweet about it. Leave reviews. Complaints on social media move faster than complaints through official channels because companies have social media teams with actual authority.

Switch to competitors who do better. This is the ultimate language corporations understand.

And if you're in an industry that controls customer service, consider that this trend is making entire sectors more vulnerable. Someone will eventually build a competitor that competes on customer service, and they'll capture significant market share. It always happens. The companies that treated customers poorly will wonder what went wrong.

Until then, we're stuck on hold, listening to the same eight-second loop of piano music, wondering if the call is still connected or if we've been forgotten in some phone system void.

If this sounds familiar, you might also be interested in The Phantom Charge: Why Your Favorite Apps Keep Billing You After You 'Canceled', which explores another maddening corporate practice that relies on customer frustration and inconvenience.