Being served by a person may become a paid upgrade

A pricing framework under discussion among customer-operations consultants would formalise something several sectors have been approaching sideways for a decade: human contact as a priced service level. Under the model, a bank, an airline or a retailer would continue to offer automated service free of charge, and would add a small fee for the option of dealing with a person. The fee would be disclosed at the point of choice, which the draft regards as the ethical part.

The word surcharge would not survive the first review. The model proposes assisted service, sold the way legroom is sold: not as a deprivation reversed, but as a comfort added. The distinction matters commercially and nowhere else. The draft is careful to note that the free tier would remain fully functional, in the sense that it would eventually end the call.

The pricing logic is the interesting part. A human conversation costs a firm a known and unremarkable amount. An automated one costs a fraction of it. The fee would therefore not be set at cost. It would be set at the level where enough customers decline — which makes the published number a direct measurement of how much irritation the average customer will absorb before paying to make it stop. No company has ever had to print that figure before.

“Nobody would be denied a human,” a spokesperson for the model's authors would say. “Access would simply be priced, as access to most things is priced. We would regard that as more honest than the present arrangement, in which access to a human is free and unobtainable.”

The exemption list would become the most-read page of any such policy. Bereavement, disability, suspected fraud and formal complaints would all be exempt, for obvious reasons — which means the list would consist almost exactly of the conversations a company would least like to have. Consumer regulators would notice this quickly. Drafting the exemptions would take longer than building the system.

The strangest feature would be the accounting. The fee would arrive in the annual report as revenue, on a different page from the labour cost it pays for. A customer buying ten minutes of a person's attention would be, in the most literal sense available, paying for that person's job — a transaction that has always existed and has never before been itemised.

The price will be small. That is the design. Small enough that paying it feels reasonable, and large enough to sort a customer base into those who get a conversation and those who get a transcript. Everything after that sorting is service design, which is how most arrangements of this kind arrive: not as a decision anyone announces, but as a default that turns out to have a price list.