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There’s an extremely common telephone situation that I feel like we ought to have a technological solution for by now:

A customer and a customer service agent are talking on the phone together. Then something goes wrong, and the call gets disconnected. (This can happen for any of half a dozen reasons, most especially when the call is on hold or is being transferred to another agent.)

And then … the call is over. If the agent happened to have (or ask for) a callback number, and if the agent was still on the call (not having already transferred the call), then the agent may call the customer back and continue things. But if those things don’t happen, then the customer is left to start the call process all over again. (Which may, for example, include spending a long time on hold, and/or navigating through a complicated phone tree.)

And I know very little about how phones work (at this level of detail), but I feel like this theoretically shouldn’t be a complicated tech problem. The information about the last working part of the connection existed somewhere in the system. If that information were retained somewhere, it seems like the customer should be able to do something to tell the system “please re-establish the last working connection.”

I’m sure there would be lots of complicated corner cases, and maybe re-establishing the connection wouldn’t be feasible in some of those cases. But I would expect that in most cases, it wouldn’t be that complicated. And I would expect that it would become even less complicated if this “reconnect the call that just disconnected” feature became widespread and well-known.

(Yep, I know about *69 (in the US, that number calls back whoever last called you, in some situations). But that doesn’t really address most of the situations I’m talking about.)