Having my money stolen was bad, but dealing with customer services was even worse

Perhaps, I wondered as I sat there in a holding position, tinny music on repeat, this was how it felt in the 1760s. The early stages of the Industrial Revolution were under way and one could fathom nothing but irritating inconvenience. Landowners grumbled about the new scarcity of cheap labour as men left the fields and headed for the mills. The once agrarian farmworker missed nipping home for lunch and hated the stuffy, airless factory.

We’re in the midst of a long teething process where AI, chatbots and automated telephone lines rule and wreck our lives. Every brand you call (if you’re enough of a sleuth to track down a phone number) – be it bank, insurance company, train-ticketing firm, health provider – drags you through that hideous vortex of questions and options, a little invigorating hold music, more questions and options, before, invariably, you lose patience and hang up. These days you don’t even get the satisfaction of slamming the phone down.

This week, my bank locked me out of the app. It was my fault because I’d shut and then opened a new account. I’d closed an account as it seemed the only way to stop a firm called Bolt from taking small, but constant, sums out of my account.

I’d never heard of Bolt, headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, and never used their, apparent, Uber-style services. But with a fiver here, eight quid there, shuffled away discreetly over a period of some four months before I noticed, I’d lost over £1,000.

When I spotted it I called the bank and was told it was Visa’s issue, Visa told me to talk to Bolt. You can’t talk to Bolt customer services unless you have an account and the app. So I opened an account and found myself explaining – in messages like smoke signals; they replied to one message each day – that while I did have an account (so I could communicate with them) I didn’t actually have an account and they were somehow facilitating these thefts.

They were having none of it and told me to talk to my bank who referred me to Visa, who referred me back to Bolt. I was issued with five new bank cards but each one resulted in the same problem: small funds disappearing from my account each day. So I closed the account. I opened a new one and my bank locked me out of the app saying I needed to re-register with a new PIN I didn’t have.

So there I am again on hold with that music. Then the robot comes on and asks for a card number, my date of birth, my mother’s maiden name. “Can I talk to a human?” I wail. There was a pause. The robot must have misheard: “For your IBAN number, press three…”

When a human did finally come on the line, they asked me all those same security questions. “But I’ve already given those details to the robot thing,” I moaned. Apparently this needed to be raised as an IT issue so I was put back on hold for about eight minutes whereupon the line just went dead.

We’ve all been through this. We go through this every day. When a brand’s app doesn’t function and you call them up to tell them, a recorded voice suggests you try using the app.

Your problem never seems to be on the lists offered, you press five for

“It’s something else”. Then you find yourself in the bizarre position of shouting to a recorded message or automated chatbot.

I know of just one noble exception to this: Wessex Water. You call a number, a human answers, they dispatch charming staff and solve issues quicker than you can say “burst water pipe”.

When Harold Macmillan, then

Lord Stockton, came to do a talk at our school in 1987, he said that the coming technology revolution would set us all free and the problem we would have would be what to do with all that leisure time. What he didn’t foresee was you and I screaming down the phone at a robot pleading: “Put me through to a human!” But perhaps he just had his timing wrong. Maybe he didn’t reckon the teething bit would take so long. Maybe we should just check back in on this stuff in 100 years. Like the landowner missing his labourers, we’re enduring the teething process so our great-great-greatgrandchildren will have it all working smoothly.

They won’t have to agonise over all this tedium. They won’t experience the frenetic punching in of numbers at precisely 8.30am to call the doctor’s surgery to get put into a triage system and then miss the moment when a doctor calls two hours later. Your fully functioning AI doctor will diagnose and prescribe drone-dropped drugs via your phone/watch/spectacles.

However, for the moment, we are in an age of chatbots, automated phone lines, AI and suchlike. It doesn’t have to be this way. We could exist on less power, cope with fewer shops, and survive without a thousand TV channels. We could legislate to have humans answer phones. But that

‘These days you don’t even get the satisfaction of slamming the phone down’

would restrict progress and a future generation would have to do the teething. So make sure you tell your children to tell their children that when AI and chatbots are so sophisticated they eradicate waiting times and hold music, it was us in the early 21st century that had to suffer while they worked to get the IT right.

We are the modern Luddites. And, while we’d like to smash the costsaving machinery, all we manage to do is crack the screens of our iPhones.