At the moment we do not offer any phone support, we appreciate this is not ideal but read on to let us explain why we have come to this hard decision and why we feel its the best way forward.
Why We Do Not Offer Phone Support
We can rely on our ticket system to work for customers as we're a small business and the unpredictable nature of calls from a phone line, for example, at present could cause either delays to other areas of the business, thus leaving customers unsatisfied with their service, or could mean not all calls are answered swiftly, thus leaving the calling customers unsatisfied with their service. Because of this, we do not offer live support as the potential issues it could cause for our small team and our customers at present significantly outweigh the benefits.
The long story is that when we offered phone support, the second the phone rights one of us needs to stop what we are doing and answer the phone and solve the issue as best we can (thats what we love to do), but the problem here is that it kills overall productivity in our business leading to a worse customer experience overall. To learn more about this context switching, there is a nice blog post about it here
https://blog.rescuetime.com/context-switching/.
So what we do is break our day into work chunks to focus on a specific task.Why is produtivity so important? Having high productivity means we can keep our costs lower which is part of the reason why our prices are some of the lowest in the industry while still having a high level of after sales service and support.
So far we feel this approach has worked well, sure its not ideal for every single customer, but the majority seem happy with this as we're well known and well regarded, and have received many positive reviews from our customers.
Will you offer phone support in the future?
As soon as we can reliably do so, we will offer live support via phone line or live chat, as we agree they are often a faster and better experience from the customer side. We try to make up for that at present with quick response times to email tickets :)
I hope that helps to clarify that decision and helps with your concern on that front :)