I hate how every support tool now has an additional “escape the llm” minigame at the start.
My brother used to do tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something that everyone can easily self-service, yet some people insisted on speaking with a human for it.
And it's not like the work flow was any different. He'd just get their username or e-mail and trigger the password reset e-mail, and they were happy and that was the end of the call.
I was at my father-in-law's place once and overheard him calling his cable company to pay his bill when he could have done it online in a fraction of the time.
Sure, there are people with weird edge cases that definitely need a human, and you should be able to get one when you need it, but I forgive them for making it slightly difficult when so many people insist on a human when they don't.
That the password-reset was self-serve yet made up 80% of calls was Sohcahtoa82's point. Users that only call in unusual/exceptional circumstances can, by their nature, make a small minority of calls despite being the majority of users.
The entire experience of fulfilling an instacart batch is a series of self-serve interactions; anybody who struggles with the basics won't be finishing the background checks to get started with the app, let alone completing enough batches to get out of new-user jail.
It is not an uncommon occurance for someone to order a single thing, and that thing to be out of stock, but such a scenario requires dancing with the llm every time before finally getting to a human where you can start the process of getting an impossible-to-complete order cancelled.
In a way I found it useful because it showed me right away that they aren't really a serious business and I was able to cancel our account before the free trial was over.
(It also turns out that their base product is more or less a standard VoIP phone that is fairly easy to set up yourself for far cheaper...but I digress)