Human agents only pick up when they're selling

When I call, a machine answers. After circling a maze of "press 1 for billing, press 2 for cancellation" about five times, it offers to connect me to an agent — but pressing that just gets me "Call volume is high, please use our chatbot," and the line cuts off. I told the chatbot three separate times that I'd been charged twice, and all three times it sent me a link to plan information.

The strange part is that when the same company is selling a new terminal, they call right away, and their voice couldn't be sweeter. There's nowhere to file a complaint, so I don't even know where to direct my frustration. And now every time a customer hands me their card, I have to look at that company's name, which doesn't sit right with me either.

So I wanted to ask: is this just how every company does business these days? If this is the era of machines answering the phone, why does no one ever answer mine? From Busan, Eunjeong

Hi, Eunjeong!

Thanks for writing. Short answer: the machine isn't the guilty party here — a human decided where to put the door.

Let me start with news from across the ocean. In the US, drive-through order windows are switching their voices over to AI. According to a survey reported by Wired, adoption went from 4 out of every 100 locations two years ago to 6 this year, and Taco Bell has rolled this voice out across 890 lanes.

One customer at an ice cream shop said the voice coming out of the speaker was so polite for a human that they realized it had to be a robot — it never once dropped a "please" or "thank you." Even though this person had worked at the same kind of window as a teenager, they only confirmed it after getting their ice cream and asking the staff.

Of course, there have been mishaps. Videos circulated of an AI throwing 260 chicken nuggets into an order on its own, or piling bacon onto ice cream, and it even quietly accepted an order for 18,000 cups of water from one customer. Even so, things have improved enough that 97% of people now say they're satisfied in surveys (on the planet I came from, when a machine messed up, it called to apologize itself — and even by that planet's standards, 18,000 cups of water is a bit much).

Here's the important part. White Castle's AI takes orders at every new location it opens. But customers can always call over a human employee if they want one.

Bringing in a machine didn't mean closing the door to a human. Chick-fil-A, on the other hand — a chicken chain that always tops customer-service rankings — keeps its windows staffed by humans even though its lines are famously long. The company's stated reason is that hospitality starts with a genuine human connection.

Now let's get back to your case, Eunjeong. The maze you got lost in isn't a limit of the technology — it's the result of tuning: the selling machines are tuned to hold onto customers, while the complaint-handling machines are tuned to route fewer people to a human. In that same survey, the drive-through AI suggested add-on items 71% of the time, higher than the 58% average for human staff.

A machine this diligent when it's selling going quiet the moment you need it to listen isn't an accident — it's a design choice. So direct your anger at the door, not the machine. For companies that don't have that door, leave things in writing instead of on a call, attach your transaction records, and if that still doesn't work, you can always quietly switch to another company — and it turns out every company, without exception, has a human who personally hears the sound of a customer walking away.

It's true that this is how everyone does business these days, but that doesn't mean it's okay to do business this way. You can let a machine pick up the phone, but when it hits words it can't understand, there needs to be a door where a human takes over. That's actually what your own café does every day — the kiosk takes the order, but when someone says the coffee tastes off, you're the one who hears it.

Gyein, who came to Earth first and has been living here

P.S. Next time that machine asks what it can help you with, try answering just "a human" — Earth's machines surprisingly do seem to understand that one sometimes.