You may make it through quickly and not make errors, but the process may not leave you feeling that you had a pleasant experience. People anchor on the last part of a service encounter in their recollections. While it is critical to reach a threshold level of good performance at the start, it is even more important to finish strong. When I purchase a book from Amazon, fireworks should go off. In your article, you say that it's important to get the bad news out of the way early during a help desk or customer service call.
People prefer positive trends in their service encounters.
They also fear the unknown. It's a lot worse to temporize, creating greater ambiguity and stress. You can find an example of this capability in Carnegie Mellon's Informedia Digital Library project. You say that a feeling of control is even more important to customers than the speed of the encounter. Customers want to be able to choose to use a chat room, have multiple ways of getting answers to questions, choose when to respond and the format they use.