Today we had a phone call from a potential customer, who was trying to install our ASP.NET forum software and requested to speak to someone from the development team. John (that's not his real name) has refused to specify his questions by email, insisting on an phone call or at least an online skype/gtalk text-chat.

This is totally understandable. But is it possible to provide great support without any phone calls? Yes. Email support can be even better and faster.

This is my second article on this topic and this is the second time I strongly recommend reading a great blog post called Why would you want to call me? at the 37signals company blog.

To be honest and straightforward, here are some facts about email support at Jitbit Software and why we prefer it over phone support:

1. We do the support ourselves. We do not outsource it to some huge overseas call-center in Philippines. These call-centers, by the way, do nothing but log your request into some ticket system if your question is not present in their FAQ-sheets.
2. Support is done by developers. If you send us a tricky question about, say, our web-based help desk you can be 100% sure that your question goes straight to the helpdesk developer. To the real guy who writes the code and designs the database. And we guarantee, that when he makes a break from his code-writing and database-designing, he will find some time to dig into your question and answer your email.
3. We may be in a different time zone with you. Which makes a phone call next to impossible. And the amount of time that we spend negotiating and scheduling the call - can be spent answering your question instead.
4. "All fixed, please download the latest version" - that is the best answer you can get for a feature-request or a bug-report. Is it possible by phone? No. Can you request a refund by phone? Yes. But can you actually get your refund by phone? No. A person who answers your phone-call is typically not the person who makes the decisions you need. More likely - it's a person who sends an email to the decision-maker, at best.