The Recursive Trap

Mark’s index finger is pulsing, a dull rhythmic ache that mirrors the flashing cursor on his screen. He has clicked ‘Refresh’ 14 times in the last 44 minutes. Each time, the airline’s website serves him the same sterile landing page: a smiling flight attendant pointing toward a search bar that doesn’t work. Mark is trying to change a flight to visit his sick mother, but the system has trapped him in a recursive loop of ‘Self-Service’ articles. He’s been directed to a knowledge base of 654 entries, none of which address the specific fare class error blinking in red at the top of his tab. He’s not being empowered. He’s being abandoned.

As an assembly line optimizer, my entire career has been dedicated to removing friction. I look for the ‘ghost movements’-the seconds wasted when a worker has to reach too far for a wrench or when a part doesn’t quite fit the jig. This morning, I found myself in Mark’s shoes, though with a different villain. I was trying to resolve a billing discrepancy with my internet provider. I started writing a scathing, multi-paragraph email, the kind that feels like a physical venting of pressure, but I deleted it after 24 minutes. What was the point? The email would just be ingested by another ‘triage bot’ that would suggest I check the FAQ for a 14th time. I felt the familiar weight of systemic inefficiency, the kind that makes you want to throw your router into the street.

We are currently living through the Great Offloading. Under the guise of ‘digital transformation,’ corporations are shifting the manual labor of service back onto the customer. It’s a brilliant accounting trick. If a customer spends an hour navigating a portal to fix a mistake the company made, those 60 minutes of labor disappear from the corporate ledger. They don’t have to pay Mark for his time. They don’t have to offer him a chair, health insurance, or a pension. They simply give him a login and call it ‘autonomy.’ It’s the assembly line in reverse: instead of the product coming to the worker, the consumer is forced to walk the entire factory floor to build their own solution.

Optimization for the Wrong Metric

This shift wasn’t designed for convenience, despite what the marketing decks say. It was designed for a $4 saving per transaction. When I optimize a plant, I look for bottlenecks. In the world of customer service, the ‘Help Center’ is the bottleneck. It is a series of intentional hurdles designed to exhaust the user until they give up.

If you make the phone number hard enough to find (it’s usually buried 14 layers deep under a ‘Contact Us’ button that just leads back to the FAQ), the volume of calls drops. On paper, this looks like a success. ‘Look!’ the VP of Operations says. ‘Our self-service adoption is up by 84%!’ In reality, customer frustration is up by 104%, and brand loyalty is quietly bleeding out in the dark.

“

The irony is that most people don’t actually want to ‘do it themselves.’ They want the thing done. If my car breaks down, I don’t want a toolkit and a 200-page manual; I want a mechanic.

– The Consumer (Regarding Resolution)

The Cost of Local Optimization

I remember an optimization project I did for a mid-sized electronics firm back in 2004. They had removed their front-line support staff in favor of an automated voice system. They saved a lot of money in the first quarter. By the fourth quarter, their return rate had spiked because customers couldn’t figure out how to calibrate the devices and, unable to talk to a human, they simply sent the product back as ‘defective.’

It was a classic case of local optimization causing global sub-optimization. They saved $144,000 in wages but lost $444,000 in hardware and reputation. We are seeing this same mistake play out today on a global, digital scale. The current generation of ‘AI’ chatbots has only exacerbated the problem. Most of them are just glorified search engines with a worse interface. They are programmed to be polite, which is infuriating when you need precision. A bot saying ‘I’m so sorry to hear you’re having trouble!’ for the 4th time feels like being patronized by a toaster.

The Death of Trust

I once spent 34 minutes trying to find a way to cancel a subscription that was hidden behind a ‘chat-only’ wall. The chat was, of course, offline. The ‘Help Center’ article on ‘How to Cancel’ was a circular path that led back to the login screen. I felt a surge of genuine, hot anger-the kind that colors your perception of the company for years. I realized then that ‘Self-Service’ has become a euphemism for ‘We don’t want to talk to you.’

We need to stop praising ‘Help Centers’ that don’t help. We need to stop pretending that a 24-step guide on how to fix a bug is ’empowerment.’ If a product requires a 44-page FAQ to be usable, the product is the problem. We are reaching a tipping point where the ‘Self-Service’ tax is becoming too high for consumers to pay.

Intelligence Over Articles

The future of service isn’t more articles; it’s more intelligence. It’s the ability to handle complexity without demanding that the customer understand the complexity first. When I optimize an assembly line, the goal is always to make the right action the easiest action. Customer service should be no different. The right action-getting the flight changed, the bill fixed, the software updated-should be the path of least resistance, not a reward at the end of a digital scavenger hunt.

The Human Conclusion

Mark eventually gave up. He closed his laptop and sat in the dark for a moment. He didn’t feel ’empowered’ by the airline’s self-service tools. He felt small. He felt like a data point that had been successfully diverted. Tomorrow, he will spend $234 on a new ticket with a different airline, not because they are cheaper, but because their website has a phone number that actually rings.

It’s a small victory for a human in a world designed to ignore them. We have spent two decades building walls of ‘self-service’ to keep people out. It’s time we started building agents that actually let them in.