Your book is pretty hard on highly automated call centers. Call centers can be strategic advantages when done right. But most companies treat them as cost centers where you just try to squeeze down cost and increase productivity with very little understanding of whether they are building better or worse customer relationships. Customers resent having to waste their time going through all those menus and computer responses because what that communicates is, "Your time as a customer is not respected by us, but our time is so valuable we can't afford to give it to you."