Considering phone-based support
Timeless, or outdated?
Welcome to 2024, everyone! To kick off the year, let’s talk about a support modality I’ve largely neglected here at Andy’s Support Notes: telephone. Yep, that thing in your pocket that you look at funny videos on can also be used for work. But should your team be offering phone support in addition to email, chat, and screen sharing? Let’s think on that for a moment. Okay, that’s enough thinking.
Point: Nope!
Come on, what is this, 1995? The only reason phone support was ever a thing was to facilitate direct conversation between a support engineer and a customer. This can be done even more effectively now with chat, video conferencing, and screensharing. You can’t do a screenshare on a regular phone call. Case closed.
Look, even though that previous paragraph was a little facetious, the point stands. Phone calls are great for live conversation, but the only thing they offer that screenshares can’t is the idea that the support engineer is available at the customer’s convenience. Call a number, get a person to talk to. But with modern email or chat-based support, an engineer can get a screenshare started within minutes of an initial customer request.
Besides, do you really want your engineers at the beck and call of whomever happened to call first? Email and chat allow critical breathing room, where your engineers can prioritize incoming requests accordingly, offer screenshares and live troubleshooting where it is relevant, and address all other requests asynchronously. This is much harder, if not impossible, to accomplish when they’re compelled to drop everything to answer a ringing phone.
The logistics of setting up an inbound support number for distributed teams are much easier in these days of VoIP and call routing software, but it’s still an undertaking. Whose phone will ring when a customer calls? Is it their personal phone or a business device? Will you now be paying for your employees’ phone service? These are all issues to be considered before setting up phone support, not after.
Finally, you already have a support ticketing system for tracking and data analysis. How are you going to add phone support information here? You’ll need to make sure your folks are taking very good notes, or alternately you have a tool to record and transcribe all of those support calls, and append them to a ticket for inclusion in your ticket analytics.
In short, it’s a lot of work, and all for something (live conversation) you can already do through your existing support modalities. Why bother?
Counterpoint: Well, maybe
Just because you don’t use your phone for voice calls anymore doesn’t mean that nobody does. A lot of organizations are a lot more comfortable making a large software purchase if they know they can pick up the phone and reach a human being if they’re running into problems. By not offering phone support, you may be unwittingly removing your product from consideration in larger enterprises, particularly ones that have stringent procurement requirements. Talk to your sales teams to see if this is a blocker in any of the deals they’ve been working lately. If enough money is on the line, you may need to start considering the phone option.
That being said, sometimes there are workarounds to standing up a full phone support operation. Some ticketing systems, for instance, will let you set up an inbound phone number that takes voicemails, converting them to new tickets in the system. If all your customer wants is a number they can call, this may be good enough for them, especially if your support team’s followup is within minutes rather than hours.
Many enterprise-level customer contracts also require phone numbers specifically for escalations: “If we have a priority 1 issue, we want to have phone numbers we can call if the standard support process is not fast enough.” As long as team leadership (i.e. you) and some members of your executive team are comfortable sharing your personal phone numbers with the customer, that can be good enough. You just need to be prepared for the possibility that an angry customer might call you at 2AM.
But if none of these alternatives are going to work with the expectations of some of your larger customers, it’s time to start looking at a phone support process. Reiterating what I said above, pay particular attention to how you’ll be integrating phone support into your existing support ticketing process. If you don’t get that right, then at best you’ll have information duplicated across multiple systems. At worst, crucial information may get lost because it doesn’t exist in your ticketing system of record, slowing troubleshooting and increasing customer frustration.
Conclusion
I’m not going to try to come up with some Hegelian synthesis here—I think that for most teams, offering phone support is not the right move. Especially when you’re a small support organization, the overhead involved in providing consistent phone support is far too much for the likely returns. But in some situations, particularly when selling into large enterprises, it may become a cost of doing business. If that’s the case, carefully investigate your options to figure out how to meet those customers’ expectations without breaking the bank, or burning out your team.
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