Most of us by now have been struggling with the tendency of corporations to replace front-end telephone answering people with Voice Response systems.
On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. Why pay humans to perform the task of routing calls to the appropriate internal support function when you can automate the process using software?
Unfortunately...voice recognition solutions seem to not be advancing in sophistication. Here in the USA, because I have a British accent, I seem to have more trouble than some people in even getting correctly routed inside a VR solution. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the soft female voice saying something like "we did not understand your response. Please repeat or say "agent". This is not counting the VR solutions that have unresolved branches, where an attempt to return to the beginning of a dialogue is impossible, and you have to disconnect and re-dial. This is an elementary failure in both design and testing of the solution.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some enterprising individuals set up a web site where you can find out how to crash through VR front-ends and get to talk to a real live human being. This is GetHuman. I have yet to spend any time using it, since I do not have an immediate requirement to enter VR Hell again, but I intend to consult when that time (inevitably) arrives.