Phone support for your web-based products – Yes or No?

I read a lot of blog posts (no thanks in part to Google Reader) and I came across a post by good ole’ 37Signals titled “Why would you want to call me?“. For you insouciant types it goes on to talk about why they don’t do phone support on their products because it is very inefficient. I see their point but more on that later.

Today Freshbooks.com did a post called “37Signals, Call Me” which was basically a web 2.0 version of the east coast/west coast throwdown. Essentially they responded saying that one of the best things about their customer service is that they DO answer the phone during the day.

I can see both of their points. They are both small companies, 37Signals having about 10 total employees at last count and Freshbooks.com at about 18. Manpower is always a problem and having someone that has to spend 10 minutes on the phone with someone taking care of an issue that could have been squashed in about a 2 minute email can be inefficient.

In my experience I have found that customers love to talk to you and it can put a nice personal spin on your company and allow customers to have an affinity to your products. I know that when my boss called Freshbooks our 1 time we had to that he was very impressed with the customer service and was an immediate sold customer.

In my side business I would love to offer daytime phone support but since there is only one of my it is virtually impossible. I have to do the email thing because I may not get to the tickets until 8 or 9 at night or on the weekends when most people are not in the office. I do have an 800 number but it is going to force you to leave a message which gets emailed to the support ticketing system.

In the end it is best to offer as much online help as possible so that if someone is calling they need specific help and it will keep those issues to a minimum.

So are you a small business and do you offer phone support to “smaller” customers?