ignoring of client responses and repeated redundant requests for information already provided, is a standard psychological domination tactic used by interrogators and ( hey, whaddaya know ) compliance people. It's meant to cause the client to become more subdued, submissive and easier to handle.

I can see how this works as an immediate measure, but I wonder how well it works overall.

To give a personal example, I was once screwed out of a non-trivial but not life-changing amount of money by a business that should have known better. They subsequently gave me the run-around, and given the circumstances I strongly suspect that this was a cynical and deliberate practice on their part.

In the end I dropped the issue. This was mostly due to my ignorance at the time of how our legal system worked, which meant the value of my time spent researching small claims procedures was likely to exceed the potential compensation (since you typically don't get any compensation for time spent on the legal proceedings themselves with a small claims action here). For a system meant to avoid wasting a lot of time and incurring a lot of costs in relatively low value cases, it sure was hard to figure out the basics of how it worked and what you had to do in order to use it.

On the other hand, I now do understand more about our system, and I have access to various lawyers and helplines and such. My view now is that a business that screwed up gets polite and constructive communications from me as long as it offers likewise in return. If it was a genuine mistake and they do reasonable things to try to make it right, that will typically be the end of the matter, no hard feelings. However, the moment any business tries to mess me around even slightly, I no longer hesitate or carry on informal discussions that don't seem to be going anywhere useful. The next thing they get is either a letter from me that formally initiates the small claims procedure or a letter from a real lawyer acting on my behalf if it's serious enough, either way clearly setting out my grievance in writing and including a deadline for resolving the matter so it's clear that if they continue to mess me around they will wind up in court.

The consequence of this policy in the years since then has invariably been getting reasonable results almost immediately and without any serious danger of actually getting to court or incurring significant expenses. Most places seem to have a policy that the moment you go legal they have to refer to their own legal department. When they in turn look at the situation properly and see that their business is obviously in the wrong, it seems that SOP is to immediately remove the customer service people from the table and the next thing I receive has normally been an offer to settle on reasonable terms with no admission of anything by either side. Usually settling on reasonable terms is all I wanted in the first place, so apparently this policy is quite successful.

I do slightly pity any business that treats me like that first one in the future, though. I once made the mistake of teaching such a business that it can succeed by doing so, and while I'm well aware of the arguments against litigating on principle, I consider that incident a stain on my karma that can only be balanced by making an example of the next one, as expensively and publicly as the law permits.