It is so fucking frustrating to explain to anyone who works as a manager in a call center that the only real thing you can count on being able to understand in

It is so fucking frustrating to explain to anyone who works as a manager in a call center that the only real thing you can count on being able to understand in your IVR system are actually just DTMF signals. For whatever reason, it seems to be impossible to explain that B, P and V all sound the same on a noisy connection when it's part of some account number. It's impossible to explain that no one knows what "alphanumeric" means and that fully half of Americans have reading comprehension below a 6th grade level. And that using terms of art, jargon, and acronyms will be extremely frustrating for users when encoded in an IVR system, since human call center workers will always clarify, but clarification in an IVR system can't happen in a natural way - you either have to anticipate that the person won't understand and waste the time of half your users, or find some impossibly elegant way to say "I'm going to use terms you don't understand, barge in by asking me to explain if you don't understand a term." The absolute zenith of an IVR system would require no human interaction with a robot and would correctly answer questions unprompted and route to human customer service without prompting or asking anything, and would never require a person to enter the same information in a call twice. What we get instead are systems that are primarily designed by non-experts whose sole metric is making the phone calls go away, but only pills can actually do that.