Hahaha, like "using the phone" means "talking to a human", that's a good one.
Using the phone means
1. Listening to a long list of automated selections, none of which are ever useful (pretty much information more easily available over the Internet).
2. Getting placed on hold for tens of minutes or an hour or more.
3. Talking to someone who will ignore your question and ask if you have tried some obvious or irrelevant option.
4. Forwarded to someone else who might be able to help you with your problem.
5. Maybe getting cut off, needing to start the entire process over again from the beginning.
In short, without massive increases in staffing and training, using the phone for customer support is almost always worse than an equivalent text, web, or email based solution.
The article went into even more detail about these shortcomings than I did, by the way.
I have no trouble getting to a human in a reasonable time (under 10 minutes) as a regular customer for services like cable/Internet, mobile, building maintenance. And for business services I usually have a real person's card and a direct phone number to them.
At least in Germany, shouting "I WANT TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN" in an angry tone to the automated menu works all the time. I never wait for a real person more than one minute.
I would find "under 10 minutes" to be a quite annoying amount of time, especially if I'm paying for them the premium rate that some customer services have.
I easily waste 10 minutes per online support chat waiting for the agent to deal with the 4 other cases they are on, fixing my typos because typing is worse than speaking and dealing with the context switching that comes from doing other stuff whilst waiting for them to respond.
Much better to start the call, get through the menu and then put my phone on the desk either on speaker or with a hands free set and doing something else whilst waiting for them, once I get the person on the phone I can then focus on the call and not other things.
Using the phone means
1. Listening to a long list of automated selections, none of which are ever useful (pretty much information more easily available over the Internet). 2. Getting placed on hold for tens of minutes or an hour or more. 3. Talking to someone who will ignore your question and ask if you have tried some obvious or irrelevant option. 4. Forwarded to someone else who might be able to help you with your problem. 5. Maybe getting cut off, needing to start the entire process over again from the beginning.
In short, without massive increases in staffing and training, using the phone for customer support is almost always worse than an equivalent text, web, or email based solution.
The article went into even more detail about these shortcomings than I did, by the way.