Automated Voice Answering Services - They Suck

Seth Godin made a post yesterday about his frustrations dealing with Verizon's voice routing system and one point really hit home with me. Why do these voice answering services ask you to punch in your phone number, only to ask you for it again once you get through to a live person?

What a waste of time. The idea of voice routing is to save time and save money by automating some of the steps. If you don't use that information, you're wasting your time as well as your customer's time.

Just another example of how things fall through the cracks.