I'm not even complaining about hold times, if I can just get directly to being on hold, and especially if they give me a time estimate that is anywhere in the c

I'm not even complaining about hold times, if I can just get directly to being on hold, and especially if they give me a time estimate that is anywhere in the correct ballpark, that's the best case scenario. I'm talking about how they bury the human agent help option, you often have to sit through and pay attention to minutes of different options to find the right path. E.g. "if you want to check your account balance, press 1. To pay a bill, press 2". Who are these absolute psychopaths that are calling the support line to check their bank balance or pay bills, instead of using the app/web site like a human being? The only explanation for this is 1. There really are tons of people confusedly calling the help line for things they could trivially do online, and the automated options actually do handle this load or 2. The help options confuse people so much that they give up and just keep paying for the thing because it's too difficult to cancel, or to handle whatever their issue is. I'm sure there's some of both, but I suspect there's a lot more of 2 going on and it has been increasing over time in recent years. More and more businesses have learned from the gym model that if you make interacting with their accounts difficult enough then people just won't be able to churn.