Equipment return chasing

I know most organisations want to make it as hard as possible for customers to actually contact a human being, but after receiving a replacement hub and returning the faulty one I received an email reminder about returning the old one from a no-reply address.  It was obviously an automated email sent just a day after the return was delivered,  but surely this is a situation where if something has gone astray it is necessary to be able to reply to contact a real person without having to spend ages navigating a bot messaging service and hoping you can actually get through to the right place to sort stuff out rather than giving up in despair because the systems are so customer unfriendly.

More generally, I do wonder if there should be an "I'm not a muppet, I've tried all the obvious things already before contacting you, let me speak to someone with a brain" communication channel.  It would have saved me quite some time in getting to the point of getting my equipment replaced!