OK – I give up.

I have come to the conclusion that there are no longer any humans anywhere in the world answering phones - writes Clinton Rogers.

I don’t want web chat, your "frequently asked questions" section doesn’t cover my complaint, and you never answer emails.

So that’s it – I have nowhere else to go.

I have lost the will to live, or (to be more precise) lost the will to take this complaint any further.

I stand defeated and I suspect there is some faceless corporate giant out there celebrating his/her/their victory.

Sound familiar to you?

If my dear mum were alive today, I wonder how she would cope.

I guess I would have to get her a computer, train her in the basics, then sit back and watch her slowly deteriorate into a crumpled emotional wreck.

Now, to be clear, I am not old (well, not that old!), nor am I a technophobe.

I do understand computers and the workings of the worldwide web.

We pensioners really can be quite savvy, you know.

But there comes a time when only personal contact will work.

Yet the thing is more and more companies and organisations are removing your ability to contact them.

Of course, it is all down to money.

It’s more expensive to hire a person in a call centre—assuming they can find people who want to work there—than it is to engineer some chatbot that offers up canned answers on a website.

The result is sort of a sliding scale of cost-saving terribleness.

If you think back for a bit, we all saw this coming.

In the beginning, nearly all companies had personal customer support, then slowly you saw those shrink (or maybe stop taking calls at weekends), then they became offshore call centres (cheaper that way), then it was a "real person" answering messages online …and now it’s all artificial intelligence.

The pandemic didn’t help because a lot of companies that did have in-person call centres shut them down.

I believe they call it progress.

So here is my question: Where do we go from here?

My hope is that it will eventually go full circle.

Maybe, just maybe, companies will wake up to what their customers really want – then realise if they really want more customers they will GIVE them what they want.

I know, wishful thinking.

But who knows.

Maybe one day people will answer phones again, banks might open high street shops (and call them branches) – and the art of real communication will be rediscovered.