Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Phone customer service
Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2018–2026), in 10 threads.
People raised many different problems with Phone customer service, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 11 complaints
- Scripted phone reps couldn't solve the problem, forcing hours of repeated calls over days2026-05-27
- Users must repeat their details to each agent after entering them into the phone tree2024-07-11
- Contact forms require an account number, so existing customers without one get routed to sales2024-05-04
- Phone support is a nightmare when you barely speak the language2022-12-08
- Repeated hold announcements are louder than music, forcing volume down and making a human answer harder to hear2022-12-08
- Scripted phone bots offer no way to reach a human when the problem doesn't fit2022-01-07
- Callers must spend 10-15 minutes navigating voice menus, waiting, and listening to canned messages2020-06-10
- Must navigate many automated menus and AI bots before reaching a human2019-07-25
- Must type a long password on a keypad, then gets misrouted and re-verified2019-05-01
- Bank phone menus are unusable and customer service is hard to understand2018-12-14
- Must rephrase requests for the bot to understand and mash 0 to reach a human2018-06-08