Simply apologizing to call center folks for making their call time metrics go up goes a LONG way to getting a friendlier interaction and sometimes shibboleet help. These poor folks are getting slammed with metrics and yet the reason they exist is because computers could not solve the problems you're calling in about. I remember being IT Help Desk and it is AWFUL right now.
Americans will even fire press secretaries to invent new units of measure to avoid having to use the metric system.