Your call is important to you

Organisations employ mindless automatons on that do not want to think, are not paid to think, and are probably not even located in the host country, thereby not bound by host country statute law. The risk of getting one of these individuals on the telephone, while preferable to a machine, remains in the unacceptably high tens of percents.

An email address is poorer than a telephone number; after all, email is low-priority communication: an email never contains a cheque, it can be ignored and even deleted before being read.

A fax number is particularly useful and effective thing to obtain, and invokes action and response quicker than posting a business letter. A fax can't go astray: one receives confirmation that the fax has arrived at the correct place, and once at the other end it begins to be processed by the first person that picks it up, rather than waiting for a specific individual to arrive and deal with it. If one has a history of traffic with an organisation (a pension provider north of Hadran's Wall springs to mind in this regard), then one can send the organisation's own correspondence or publication back to it along with the business complaint it relates to, while retaining a copy for one's own records.

Useful suggestion?

I also hate those inane recorded messages, especially the ones which give you a commercial message which rambles on and on before you are even offered choices. But what to do about them ? Who knows? But eternal rewards in heaven (or a week at the Playboy Mansion) to whoever comes up with some way to hack into these systems and destroy them. The greatest inventions of the twentith century were air conditioning and the remote control mute button LOL. Surely a way to kill these recorded beasts will rank as one of the greatest inventions of this century.