> All the hoop jumping and maze-like options etc are explicitly for this purpose.
So, market pressures have implemented "The Castle" by Kafka. Progress!
Was it true that workers were penalized for spending too long helping individual customers?
Yes. One of the systems was called "adherence." TSYS was using it in 2007 or so. Calls were supposed to be resolved within a certain time or you were penalized.
Same with your arrival time, bathroom breaks, lunch, leaving. You are/were tracked by the minute and penalized for any deviation in either direction. And they canned people all the time for straying too much.
It was the most sadistic workplace I've seen in the first world.
Even back then there was talk about when chatbots would be good enough to remove as many humans as possible from the process. And considering how low paid some contact center workers are, it's pretty sad.