Consumers vs. automated customer service

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clipped from www.newsday.com Consumers vs. automated customer service Richard J. Dalton Jr. | Consumer Watch Norma Freedman received notification in May that a movie from the Columbia House mail-order DVD company would be sent, but she didn't receive the usual code used to cancel the order. So she did what many people would do: She called the company. And, like many consumers calling a customer-service number, she reached an automated service that couldn't resolve her problem and wouldn't provide a agent. That inability to reach a live representative is one of the top complaints of consumers calling customer-service centers, according to experts and surveys of the customer-service industry. And the problem is becoming increasingly common as companies try to divert callers to their Web sites or provide more services via voice-response systems to save money, experts said.