Seriously, I’d rather either sit on hold and press buttons instead of trying to explain to an AI several times that I want it to connect me to a real person. I also have a “non standard” accent as well, so the thing probably cannot even understand me.
Some of them are wise to this and won’t let you do it. The FedEx call bot actually hung up on me for doing it.
I was hoping there was some law (or at least fear of a lawsuit) that kept that functionality around for accessibility reasons. I suppose with the PSTN phasing out the last of the analog bits they don’t even worry about rotary phones anymore. Would still be nice to have the “Shibboleet” functionality…