I offered telephone sales and support for my prior company. For the first six months, or so, it was fine. Low customer count, and it was nice to talk to folks, find out what they were looking for, help them choose the right product, etc. But never underestimate how much more time a phone interaction takes than email or a ticket in an issue tracker--unless you're willing to be rude and end the conversation quickly. This is a skill I never obtained in seven years of running that company.

Someone dug up my phone number from whois just yesterday. I'm a nice guy, and I try to be helpful, even when it should be obvious from the fact that there is no phone number anywhere on our website that we aren't equipped to deal with telephone queries. So, I answered his questions as best I could. 45 minutes later, I hung up, having possibly convinced someone to spend $138 with us. For anyone not doing the math on this, even if he buys, given our long-term support and product maintenance commitments, I've already made no money on the sale. If he purchases the product, and then calls me again for help, I'm way down in the hole on this sale.

Here are the problems with talking to people on the phone:

1. You don't have a lot of customers today, so it's cheap and easy to answer a couple of calls per day. But, if you have any level of success, you will have more customers each day--and if you do your job, the number will only ever increase, forever and ever. 10 customers having your phone number aint so bad. 1000 customers having your number is bad. 10000 customers having your number is a nightmare, and an expensive one, at that. You have to hire someone, at some point, to handle the phones...and if they're technically savvy enough to help people, they won't be cheap. It's also a soul-sucking job. Nobody likes doing phone support. It's high stress, low satisfaction, and overall just sucks. Turnover will be high, and the low morale of this team will hurt morale in the rest of the company. You could outsource it, but that'd be admitting you're willing to provide shitty service. You could put them in a different building, but that hurts morale of the support team even more--and makes your developers no longer accountable for their products ease of use.

2. The kind of people who refuse to buy if they can't call you for sales assistance will insist on calling for support. And they will call a lot. This was a definite trend with my previous company. If I had to talk to someone for an hour or two to make the sale (expensive products back then), I expected to talk to them again for several hours through the life cycle of the product. If they can't call you for support, but could for sales, they will be angry--loudly, publicly, angry--about this difference. "You're easy to reach when you want my money, but when I need help you're nowhere to be found." No matter how aggressively you help people online or via email, you will be described as being unsupportive and unhelpful, and only interested in the sale.

3. Expense and opportunity cost. I did the math on this during the last couple of years of operation of my company, and I should have done it the first year of operation and every year after...I was losing money on every box I sold, because of the time I spent on the phone with folks. When I "closed" the company and stopped selling systems, and only provided contract services on an hourly basis, I had the most profitable year of my companies existence.

4. You can't help people with technical products on the phone, but they expect you to. You can't send them links to relevant docs, you can't send screenshots back and forth, you can't suggest commands for copy/paste usage. What you can do is spend five minutes explaining that "slash" and "backslash" are different characters, and that when you say "slash" you actually mean "slash" and not "backslash", likewise "dash", "underscore", "pipe", "hash", upper vs. lower case etc. So, 45 minutes into the call, you've finally gotten a sane description of the problem. An hour after that, you've solved their problem. So, it is deeply frustrating for everybody concerned. Two or three emails or comments in a ticket tracker would have solved this problem in a tenth the time, and that's time you could spend helping other customers.

I'm sure there are products and businesses out there that will be well-served by having a phone number. But, if your product is technical in nature, and doesn't cost thousands of dollars, I would argue that you'd have to be an absolute fool to make a promise to help people via telephone.