这是人工智能CHATGPT。读了我的这篇文章后，给我写的英文版
Title: The little cost savings that are costing America its humanity
Byline: By [Your Name], [City, State]
Text:
When I first arrived in the United States in the 1980s I was moved by something I had never seen before: the small courtesies that made civic life feel humane. Store clerks trusted customers. Service workers treated you like a person. A call to a business usually meant a friendly voice who could actually solve your problem.
Today those memories feel like a different country. Stores put goods behind locked cases and post security guards at doors. Banks and companies flood our mailboxes with warnings about scams. These changes are disruptive and unpleasant, but tolerable — until you try to make a simple phone call.
Most companies now put customers through automated trees and AI scripts that can ask for your name, address and membership number and then give a canned response that does not solve anything. If you insist on speaking to a human, you may be routed to a call center thousands of miles away where language barriers, scripts and short time windows leave you guessing and frustrated. If the call drops, you start over. The pain is repeated, banal and corrosive.
For many of us, a phone call is not an invitation to recite frequently-asked answers — it’s the last resort to solve a real, specific problem. Replacing that interaction with cost-saving automation may show short-term savings on spreadsheets, but it destroys goodwill, alienates customers, and — in my experience — drives people away. If companies really want loyalty, they should invest in human agents empowered to fix problems quickly, not hide behind robotic menus and outsourced scripts.
This is not only my private complaint. Journalists and consumer surveys have charted a broad decline in customer service in recent years, with automation and cost-cutting often blamed for rising consumer frustration. Restoring accessible, humane service is not merely sentimental: it’s an investment in trust. Companies that advertise “we care” should back that claim by ensuring a human can answer the phone and solve the issue — and by making that option easy to find. I would switch my accounts tomorrow to any bank, insurer or utility that publicly committed to “live-agent first” phone support. That is a stronger business model than many executives realize.
Policy makers, consumer advocates and company boards should treat customer service as a public good. Regulations can require clear, reachable pathways to human assistance for time-sensitive and complex customer needs. Consumers can vote with their wallets — and with their pens — by filing complaints, writing letters and sharing stories.
I am not asking for nostalgia. I am asking for accountability, for companies to consider the human cost of the spreadsheets. If we lose the human voice at the other end of the line, we stand to lose something far harder to replace—social trust.
