Relaxed, with stretches of time between ice creams, a Spanish beach holiday seemed the perfect moment to tackle an issue that had been weighing on me for months: cancelling a tech subscription. So I found myself passed between customer service assistants for over an hour, increasingly frazzled, before giving up. Big tech, 1; me, 0.
This is one example of the “annoyance economy”, which, according to a recent report, includes myriad such annoyances (spam, robocalls and unseen fees, as well as unhelpful chatbots). All this leaves “people feeling overwhelmed, ignored, or jerked around” and costs “wasted time and lost money”. The total? $165bn a year in the US alone.
Some throw yet more money at the problem. Kath Clarke, who provides remote (human) personal assistants to clients, tells me that most requests are not for fancy holidays or high-end restaurant bookings, but “to take on the things [customers] absolutely dread: sitting on hold with the council, navigating endless customer service chatbots to sort a refund”.