Too, companies are getting very hostile to having to employ ANY people in customer service nowadays. If they aren't sending the jobs to India, they're still paying them far below a living wage, getting high turnover and doing woefully inadequate training. Once you take the job off a career track and pay close to minimum you'll get much higher turnover, less skill retention, lower caliber people and not much fear of losing the job, since it's likely a stopgap anyway. This has been a problem for a long time with award-travel bookings of complex itineraries or anything where people have to call repeatedly to get someone knowledgeable.