[dataker]

It's not just customers.

I manage teams of support engineers/agents.

They will do anything to avoid a phone call.

Indeed, almost all the time, phone calls lead nowhere, only to emotional distress.

If you have a really serious issue, you need to escalate to an actual software/platform engineer, and that's something that takes hours, if not days.

[fivre]

Phone calls in isolation are terrible. I've worked as support for both older and newer service providers. For the older provider, calls reached support agents with all the customer's information readily available, and support agents had easy means to invite customers to screen sharing sessions, so they could see what we were looking at and we could discuss it together.

That said, some customers weren't able to share screens (typically because they were working with classified systems), so I acquired the fairly uncommon skill of directing people through a Unix system by speaking commands letter by letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet while navigating through my own example system. That was slow, but it worked, and was necessary given the restrictions.

With my newer service provider, phone support is seen as some sort of extra option in case of emergencies, and is treated more or less as a pager system. Calls come in with no context, we do not have screen sharing, and the experience is generally terrible for both the customer and support agent.

No means of support is inherently bad, but all means of contacting support have their limitations. Good support departments recognize those limitations and address them, so that all avenues of support are effective for either addressing an issue or communicating why it must be handled via another channel if it's not something that can be resolved at the point of contact.

[jpatokal]

I also manage a support team. Phone calls are indeed not very useful for solving issues, but they are critical for reducing customer anxiety and ensuring that you've understood their problem correctly.