Your structure is not a map anyone else can read

Asking customers to route themselves through your organisation is asking them to do your job.

Menus, department names and referral routes are usually built from the inside out. They reflect how work is grouped internally, which makes perfect sense to staff and none at all to the person choosing. A customer does not have a billing problem or a technical problem. They have a problem, and the classification is an artefact of your structure. When you demand the classification up front, you have quietly transferred a task, and the penalty for guessing wrong lands entirely on them.

You can see the cost in the misroute rate, if anyone measures it. Every wrong turn produces a wait, an explanation, a transfer and a second explanation. The customer is then noticeably less patient, and the second person receives someone already annoyed by a decision the organisation made on their behalf. Frontline staff absorb that friction daily and are often blamed for the tone of conversations that were poisoned before they began.

The better approach is to accept the routing burden yourself. Let people describe the problem in their own words and do the sorting behind the scenes. Where a choice must be offered, write the options as situations rather than department names. And treat every misroute as a design defect to be logged, because it is evidence that the map you handed out does not match the territory anyone is walking through.