Text vs Speech
My wife, after reading my previous post, commented that it would be much harder for a service person to ignore requests to drop the canned and content-free responses and actually deal with the problem if the interaction were face to face rather than through typed text on a computer screen.
I was reminded of another conversation with her yesterday, after an extended World of Warcraft session in which we (and our son and daughter) had all participated. One of the other players, after leaving the group, had complained extensively and (by her account) unreasonably on the relevant chat group. My wife commented that the player in question came across as a much nicer and more reasonable person in voice communication than in text. She suggested that perhaps, to him, typed conversations were not entirely real, or at least much less real than voice communications. If the conversation is not real, the person on the other side of it is also not real, so being rude, even unjustifiably rude, doesn't really count—rather like being rude to a non-player character, a computer generated "person."
All of which may perhaps link back to an old puzzle of mine—why the mass lecture did not disappear after the invention of the printing press. And perhaps also to my experience, some years back, giving public lectures at long distance. I did it once over the telephone, and the experience was, from my end, very unsatisfactory, like talking into a hole. The second time was with video as well as audio—I could see the audience and they could see me—and it felt much more real.