The hot new status symbol: phone calls

There are a lot of ways you might characterize customer-service calls: frustrating, time-consuming, annoying. Increasingly, people are using a new word to describe these interactions: fancy. In a world where navigating even the tiniest blip can turn into a consumer nightmare, the ability to speak with a real, live human being has become special.

I probably do not have to tell you how difficult, if not impossible, it is to get in touch with a customer-service representative nowadays. Companies have downsized and phased out call centers in an effort to cut costs, causing wait times to balloon. Business phone numbers are buried deep on their websites, meant to be accessed by only the most determined consumers. Once customers do get on the line, they're confronted with an army of robots designed to keep them from speaking with someone. In some cases, it is truly impossible to speak with an actual person. Corporations are pushing consumers toward chatbots and emails and FAQs and some good old figure-it-out-on-your-own nudges, all in the name of efficiency and, ultimately, profits. Companies are now claiming that AI will fix this, which, I don't think we should hold our collective breath.

In the midst of all this, the phone call has become a status symbol of sorts. You want to speak to a representative? That's a privilege, not a right.

Companies have made it so difficult to talk to a person that customers — especially younger people — have started to internalize the idea of a phone call as a premium product. Gen Zers don't like to talk on the phone, except when it makes them feel exclusive and important. McKinsey recently found that when Gen Zers were engaging with premium brands or services — say, a fancy American Express card — they were actually more likely to make a call than millennials and as likely to call as boomers. They see the ability to call as a concierge-like service that helps them skip to the front of the line and offload the labor of whatever they're trying to accomplish onto someone else.

"The verbatims we heard were things like, 'Well, if I'm paying $500 for a premium card from Barclays or Amex or whatnot, then part of the service for me is phone,'" said Eric Buesing, a partner at McKinsey who advises clients in banking and financial services. "This is a generation that's always grown up with digital and not the transition to digital, and therefore the phone is not more of a legacy, it's more of an assistant, somebody that will just do it for me."

Gen Zers aren't wrong in their assessment that the phone is a perk. It's a fact of life across the consumer economy.

If you've ever experienced a flying snafu while traveling with people who have various airline statuses, you may have noticed some of your fellow travelers had a much easier time getting their flight rerouted or their baggage found. That's not an accident: Airlines used to have separate phone numbers for elites — and in some cases, they still do — but now, even if high-status passengers don't know the magic number, they get sorted into better and faster phone service anyway.

"The top tiers of elite status do give you access to special phone numbers," said Clint Henderson, a managing editor at The Points Guy, a travel blog and website. "They also know your phone number when you're calling, so they'll route you to a quicker queue."

Henderson lamented that this passenger caste system isn't as good as it used to be — for the winners, obviously. In the past, you got really specialized call desks and agents who could go extraordinarily above and beyond if you were lucky (and spent enough). Now, he said, airline cost-cutting has even come for elite travelers. Still, they're getting a much better deal on the phone than everyone else.

"It used to be really, really good," Henderson said. "And now it's just really nice to have, especially when there's a meltdown or something, because you're going to get priority for callbacks and for rebooking."

It's not just airlines — plenty of companies are great at finding all kinds of ways to sort customers into priority levels, including when it comes to the phone. Verizon, for example, charges a $10 "agent assistance fee" when you pay your bill by calling its customer-service line. AT&T and T-Mobile charge to pay via human, too. The only way to get live phone support 24/7 from Yahoo is by paying. (I am not entirely sure how many people need to call Yahoo these days, but per Reddit, this is an issue people have encountered.) Best Buy's 24/7 phone tech support is available as part of a package that costs $180 annually — something it took me a lengthy back-and-forth with a chat assistant to figure out. (Best Buy points out that package has other features and that there are plenty of free ways to connect with its agents.) AppleCare+ gets you priority phone access. Fidelity has various tiers of advisory services. You may be able to get someone on the phone at a lower tier, depending what you need, but to get phone access to a dedicated team of advisors, you have to invest $50,000.

Consumers are frustrated that access to a human is on the decline — that extreme corporate frugality has rendered hearing a voice on the other end of the line a novelty. Simultaneously, those with premium status have come to, probably fairly, believe that spending so much money entitles them to a level of direct access that's become scarce.

"It becomes really easy for companies to start positioning the access to phone service as a premium," said Michelle Kinch, an assistant professor of business administration at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "It's more expensive, and so therefore you've got to have the revenue associated with that to make it a profitable part of the business.

"It just kind of boils down to that cost-benefit. If I, as a company, can calculate what my customer profitability is, then I can determine where I could deploy those more expensive resources, particularly if I'm going to engender higher levels of loyalty from the customer as a result. It becomes a perk."

Kinch's research on the impact of increasingly sterile customer service on the consumer psyche has found that lacking human contact can make an already anxiety-inducing situation worse. When people are on edge — which they often are when they're trying to reach a representative — they crave human contact. Just the reassurance that they could talk to someone if they wanted makes them feel better. She's recently been working on a small-scale study on AI in customer service and has observed that people interacting with virtual agents reported feeling more anxious immediately after those interactions than those who dealt with people. Anecdotally, it tracks — plenty of people have had the experience of, say, confirming a credit-card charge with a bot and then wondering if that confirmation stuck. And in a high-anxiety situation, like dealing with a travel cancellation or making a financial transaction, people just really want the option to talk to someone if they need to.

"We have that old adage that misery loves company for a reason," Kinch said.

She recently experienced a pay-to-phone conundrum with a prominent research platform. She switched jobs and got locked out of her old email, and the only way for her to call customer service about the problem was to pay for a subscription. Even the person on the phone couldn't solve her issue, but she had to keep paying to subscribe because the only way to close her account was over the phone, too.

There aren't many obvious solutions here. Buesing, from McKinsey, said call volumes were going up at many organizations, meaning the need for human contact isn't going away. He's talking to his clients about introducing premium chatbots to solve customers' problems. That could perhaps be nice for people who access them, though given the state of the chatbot, which is mediocre at best, it's hard to imagine exactly how a chatbot could achieve premium status.

Companies could, of course, invest more in call centers and hire people to talk to customers, but that would require them to do something they would very much like to avoid: spend money.

Part of the reason the phone feels fancy is that it is fancy, or at least a relief. Sometimes you want to explain your issue to someone (without yelling or being mean, eh) and get it figured out and taken care of. The phone may have become a status symbol, but it shouldn't be.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.