Yep, ye tricks of olde like repeatedly saying „help“ or „customer service“ don’t seem to work on those… i recently dealt with an especially frustrating case when moving and buying a brand-new fiber connection. Turns out, they got the activation date wrong, so I called the support hotline mentioned in the confirmation mail. The menu prompted me for my customer ID - which I didn’t yet have - and wouldn’t let me through, even after trying all possible options. In the end, I just called the sales hotline and let them handle the transfer…

I particularly hate the ones that just hang up if you guess wrong three times.

Yep, we had a few IVRs set up like that for clients at an old job. The reality was there for those was that there was no pool of agents we could transfer those calls to, it was set up to be an entirely automated system by request from the client.

It was mainly for doctor appointment reminders, though, so hopefully those called still had their appointments written down somewhere (or also signed up for email reminders).