From years of participatory experience I can report that the same paradigm that is the collective cultural and leadership decision drivers behind the artificial construction of the injected (and often patronizing) structure of the automated voice response system is the same paradigm that budgets and constructs the “backend” system/process that the human is working with and constrained by (once we get to the human). The motivations are legion but ultimately many of them root back to a belief (hope?, wish?, fantasy?) that the gamut of customer issues and customer support interactions can be solved by neatly contained and crisply (yearly cycle or less) MBO silver bullet fixes.

So, before “piling on” to some suggestions offered in this article I’d like to propose that there is a deeper concern with dad’s voice interaction agitation than just the frustration of the transaction. Perhaps unconscious is the thought that the larger systemic cultural assumption is that rather than address honestly with hard work and longer term system quality improvement process issues we are evolving to force the participants to fit a preconceived conformance to constrained and stifling automation. If we are blinded consumerism driven drone-people we perpetuate this as we demand more and more “things” for less and less cost.

Long preface to add to a suggestion. Once a human is finally reached in many cases it is helpful to remember they may be on relatively low wages, brutally measured to metrics counter to human empathy and hamstrung by backend processes/systems. Assuming some of those things to some extent may be true it may be helpful and a personal growth opportunity to 1)stay calm and positive to diffuse fear (fear paralyzes creative thought), 2) seek to frame the issue in multiple different ways to spark collaboration innovation, and 3) use the “we” approach to find any kind of resolution (“what if ‘we’ canceled the subscription entirely then reordered as a new subscriber on auto pay?”).

I believe this is perhaps much bigger than automated interfaces. Anthropologically we humans cannot thrive or even survive without collective collaboration. If we do not learn to work together in a rapidly changing technological, political, sociological and unmoored mythological culture we may be greatly diminished for our narrow and short sighted behaviors.