Haha well said Rob

Thanks for the comment. It’s right at the top of the FAQs so I don’t think it’s that hard to find, but yea, when we decided not to provide phone support we weren’t going to plaster the phone number all over the site It was a conscious decision to stop taking phone calls to help our business grow, and it’s worked out. I really think we’d be in poor shape right now if we had a 1-800 number and had phones open 10 hours a day. E-commerce has a lot of expenses as it is, staffing 1-2 phone people would crush us.

Anyway, the point was that phone service doesn’t automatically equal great customer service. Ideally, you’d create such a great customer experience that no one ever had to call or email. That would be the best for both the customer and the business. For a small company like us, email is just SOOO much more efficient for the majority of questions. You can have semi-standard responses for similar questions, and you can link – imagine suggesting 20 detailing products for a new customer over the phone…you still have to follow up with an email to link them to everything. Plus we can link to guides and tutorials. It takes us less time and I think it works out better for the customer, even for some customers who in the beginning might have preferred a phone call. Plus you don’t need to listen to someone blab on for 45 minutes You can answer the email in 5 minutes and move on. You can also batch your email and sit down for chunks of time and rip through all of your emails for the morning. Phone calls are very interruptive by nature.

In the rare instances where a problem does require a conversation, it’s not like we avoid the phone. We pick it up and call the customer. That’s just a really really small amount of orders.

My girlfriend experienced a stupid error trying to get in touch with eBay this week – their CAPTCHA was broken and whaddya know you need to get past the CAPTCHA to get to email them (phone support for premium customers only apparently). In the end we resolved the issue using IE6, but it remains broken on firefox 3.5 on all of our computers – clearly some incompatibly that needs addressing. Avoiding phone support is great, if you have something in its place that will do the job. If you do, you rock at customer service. If not, you suck.

This is a practice several companies have down to a science, such as BMG Music – it’s rumored their phone number is only listed on a tablet that is sitting next to the holy grail. Google is another company that is difficult to get on the phone, yet paypal is fairly easy…. every company has their own culture and habits.