People Tend to Forget the Human Factor (but not THAT Human Factor)

1)
The prevolent dogma in Voice UI design is "Don't hide the agent!" which is very important in the initial roll out of an automated Call Centre routing system, and in the days when people weren't as used to dealing with machines as they are today, but I'm going to argue that there is another side to this - there are some people who have explicitly decided not to deal with a human being, and don't WANT to be rolled over to an agent.

This has come up in the context of a 411-deployment we've integrated with. If, after the first bit of information gathering, the set of results is too large to present in a uni-modal form, or, the first result presented to you is not the entry you were looking for, you will automatically be transferred to an operator. I don't fault them for relying on operator back up, since I cannot think of a decent, user-friendly means to present a huge list of results, but I think it should be optional. I know I hang up every time I'm threatened with it. They seem to see it as a failure of their design and implementation that they're seeing so many hangups during the transfer.

2)
People are tire kickers by nature. If you introduce a new feature to a menu, people are going to check it out, whether the feature interests them or not. On the same 411 deployment, they're also concerned about the number of people who they consider to be misdirects. That is, people who press the DTMF to go to 411, but hang up without starting a search. They seem to think it's due to their misunderstanding of what "Directory Assistance" is. Uh.. what? We've racked our brains for a more commonly used term, and cannot think of one. Anyone?