The other day I was able to take care of what I thought was a reasonably complicated customer service issue through an automated assistant.

I take a daily prescription medication and it’s on automatic refill. However now and then I miss my pill and after years of this I found myself with 20-30 pills left when my next bottle was ready.

So I tried to call the pharmacy and say hey that bottle of pills you have waiting for me? I still need it, but not for about 3 weeks. Can you push my entire schedule back that much but otherwise keep the pace the same?

Turned out I was able to do this just by listening to menus, selecting from multiple choice, and entering numbers for dates.

I was so satisfied! I don’t want to talk to a human if I can possibly help it. I’d much rather deal with an automated system as long as it can do what’s needed. The problem is that most of them can’t. But then again most customer service humans are useless too, so…

It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those options. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons…