When I did Comcast phone support it was common to have different call centers and queues for different regions, each region has different internal tools owing to differing networks during acquisitions so only agents with the right tools and accounts would be able to handle certain customers. Our center handled multiple regions but agents would usually be trained to handle just one. Usually the IVR will make cursory account billing and outage checks and then forward the call to the appropriate location.
I also had the displeasure of working for Comcast in phone support before I went back to school and this is definitely part of the reason.
Multiple completely different decrepit and kafkaesque billing systems because they were too lazy or incompetent to properly migrate customers over to a unified modern one. IMO, one of the reasons Comcast has had notoriously bad customer support is because their internal systems were so complicated that even reps who wanted to help might have just given up and told you they fixed the issue to get you off the phone.
To ensure you have the information available at the time of calling. Account number lookups is a waste of time/money for them. They don’t care about the CX part enough. In some cases, they hope that prompted an “oh forget about it” moment.
It’s also a highly metric driven industry. They may have a goal that each agent has an average call length of 3 minutes. But when they implemented that goal the agents pushed back on management about how it takes 3 minutes just to look up an account. So as a quick fix/hack they put up an automated screen to force the customer be prepared.
Also it’s like a captcha in that it prevents ddos of the phone lines.
From their perspective even if they can't pass it on, making you provide it as early as possible before you've reached a human ensures you'll have it ready when the human requests it.
How many callers just hang up at the automated first query for the information?
Having recently dealt with some brutal rental car phone support situations, I'm convinced these companies prioritize getting callers to just give up with the minimum of resources expended on their part.
Should you actually reach the live person they want you locked and loaded to not waste their time waiting.
I suppose it also let's the entity running the IVR to monitor and log things themselves. Now they know what you called about, and to which third party they directed your call to. If the first party runs the post call questionnaire, they might get full loop feedback on how their contractor is handling calls; from the end user an not the contractor.
