The most common question on our contact page is some variant of “why don’t you have a phone number?” The second most common is “is everything okay over there?” Both are reasonable. The answer to both is the same and it is operational, not ideological.
The data
For our first six years we had a phone line. We tracked, for the last three of those years, the disposition of every inbound call. The numbers came out roughly:
- 52% of calls were sales inquiries that could have been (and ended up being) handled by email.
- 18% were existing-customer order status questions that were also in the customer’s email confirmation.
- 14% were vendor sales calls.
- 9% were callers who had reached a wrong number.
- 7% were urgent, time-sensitive operational questions that genuinely needed a phone.
The 7% that needed a phone justified the line. The other 93% justified the cost of someone to answer it. The cost was not just the salary. It was the interruption: every call took someone off the wash floor or out of an inspection, and the recovery time after a phone interruption averaged about 4 minutes.
What we did
We removed the phone. We added a guarantee on email response: under four working hours, every email, no exceptions. We tracked customer satisfaction before and after. Satisfaction went up.
For the 7% of calls that had been genuinely urgent and time-sensitive, the email channel handled all of it. The urgency, as it turned out, had been the caller’s preference for phone, not a true real-time requirement.
The exceptions
A standing-order customer with a delivery in progress has a direct phone for the dispatcher. A driver with a load on the road has a direct phone for the same dispatcher. We are not against phones in general. We are against a public phone line that is mostly the wrong solution to the caller’s actual problem.