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What service are you running where the "overwhelming number of [y]our users" tell you that phone is their preferred method of contact?

As I wrote on the blog, email allows me to:

    - respond when it’s convenient for me.
    - keep most of my attention on what I’m doing.
    - archive and share the correspondence easily.
    - filter content I don’t want to hear anymore.
    - remain anonymous.
    - make careful, researched, edited responses.
    - include screenshots, links to videos, and other files which might be helpful.
    - continue to correspond if I loose my hearing and/or speaking abilities.

I’m not hearing impaired, and I much prefer email. Phone calls are only acceptable in a small number of situations, and I want to be the person to decide when those situations occur.

Yeah, for a lot if cases it's harder to explain things over the phone. Also you might get someone who doesn't know the answer and you need to explain it again to the next person. Add to that I'd rather my email sit in a queue that stay on hold on the phone.

I generally prefer phone contact. Not because I actually prefer talking on the phone, but because of how different most companies treat email and phone contact.

When you talk on the phone, you have someone who's listening to you right now, and if they misunderstand you, you can re-explain. If they continue to be unhelpful, you can talk to a supervisor.

Email, on the other hand, seems to go into a queue, which is responded to with one of a variety of boilerplate responses, most of which aren't really quite to the point. Yeah, I can respond when it's convenient to me, but so can they, causing a simple misunderstanding to require multiple round trips of idiocy lasting several days.

Phone calls allow me to:

    - make sure that I have your attention until my problem is solved

Phone calls make sure I waste my time trying to get your attention via low-paid level one staff who have minimal training and who possibly hate me and all other customers; until I give up navigating your awful phone-menu system and getting misunderstood by aforementioned staff and being put on hold for hours

So you think the staff replying to your emails are highly paid and love you?

No, but it doesn't cost me money to send an email. I'm in the UK. We tend to have to pay to call companies. Where a company has a "freephone" number that's only free from landlines (and possibly a small number of mobile tariffs) - anyone calling from a mobile will have to pay lots.

The combination of poor customer service, and not getting the problem resolved, and having to pay for it, is horrible.

Our customers are other businesses, but not focused on the technology field (electronic purchasing, actually), so your mileage may vary. I'm certain that if our target customer were tech-focused, that far more would prefer email, but that's just not the case for us.

I fully recognize the benefits of asynchronous communication, but I'm not out to educate my customers on the best way to communicate. I'm here to respond to them in whatever way they prefer. You'll be happy to hear that we let them choose the preferred method.

I'm much like you. For the most part, I prefer email, especially with a new client/potential client, because I hate being caught off guard in those first moments. It's often easier to explain things in writing. I can edit before clicking "send" and it gives me a written record of whatever it is we've been talking about without having to take notes.

That said, I also quite frequently run into situations where multiple emails or IM conversations that go nowhere could be easily solved by a quick phone call. But this generally happens when I'm working on a project with someone, rather than simply passing along information.

I prefer email for general correspondence, but if I'm looking to do some brainstorming and collaborative problem-solving, or to do a quick review of some code/layout/functionality nothing beats a phone call. It's more engaging and more fast-paced for quickly exchanging and discussing ideas than email or even IM.

I prefer phone for urgent and important matters like bank transactions , for others i prefer email, i can think before replying to them , it will help both parties ,if the email is framed properly, there will be no need for further converstions. But yeah reply does take time , it would be good if we include a php script that lets us know if they had opened our mail or not.

And for physically impaired people , there must be an option for SMS , as he said it is 2011 and technology helps :)

I feel like I must be one of the only people on HN who doesn't mind a phone call. Yes, admittedly, I am not hearing impaired, and I do understand the desire to pick your preferred method of communication, but a lot of times it can take me 30 seconds to solidify something in a phone call that could take 4-5 texts or chat messages, especially if you are trying to actually make plans with someone.

Phone calls from anyone are usually a pain in the ass. I have to stop what I'm doing and context-switch wasting my time. Unless your company is live dispatching transplant organs or is rescuing me from being trapped in an earthquake or if you're my wife--I NEVER want a phone call. I don't like wasting my time listening to nonsense. Amazon works just fine without calling me so I can't imagine why any other business aside from a few very narrow exceptions would ever need to call anyone. Remove validates phone number :presence => true and leave me the hell alone. Xie xie.

Besides accessibility being enshrined in law in many places there are lots of people that simply don't like giving their phone number and/or being called. Giving your users multiple options for communication is a no-brainer.

> Besides accessibility being enshrined in law in many places

This is already resolved by the phone company for hearing impaired people. It's not as if phones just popped up. They've been around for a bit longer then the internet.

The trick is to be polite and say HOW should we contact you? You prefer email? Okay, email please. And you prefer phone? Okay, phone number please.

And never, never put a "required" validation on something like a phone number that someone simply may not have at all.

Yes, this is the best way to handle customer preferred contact. When someone "requires" a phone number, I think, "I'm not answering that phone call - you need to email me so I can work you into my day."

Why do you insist on creating a false dichotomy between requiring a phone number and disallowing phone contact altogether? You can support multiple methods of communication with any single one being optional. Making the phone number optional wouldn't inconvenience your other customers in the slightest.

I've found that if provided with a phone number, the people you'd least like to call you, do.

>We don't have a policy on how to accommodate deaf or sight impaired customers,

This is not legal in the UK under disability discrimination laws; I'm surprised it's not the same in other countries.

As well as being not legal it's a pretty shoddy way to treat potential customers.

>This request has moved me to action.

Cool! I'd be really interested to read how it goes; if you have problems; if you get any customer feedback.

TTY users are declining. I don't know the statistics, but 80% of my interaction with the Deaf is by Videophone (VP) (aka video relay service (VRS)).

Training staff on how a VRS or TTY relay call works is pretty simple. A few general rules are: 1) Talk as if you are addressing the Deaf person directly (don't say, "tell her hello", say "hello"). 2) Speak in discrete chunks of meaning with pauses in between to give the interpreter a chance to catch up. 3) Expect everything you say to be interpreted.

I don't think the OP is suggesting phone support should be phased out; he's saying that email support should be there too and be on par. I can name a couple of companies I've had to interact with in the past few days that only offer phone support: Student Finance, EDF Energy.

www.edfenergy.com/products-services/for.../priority_services.pdf

>If you have a textphone, please call our Minicom Line free on 0800 096 2929

I agree that email (as well as phone) is a better solution.

By all means, have a field in your forms for "phone number". Just don't make it a required field.

A lot more than just your deaf customers hate phone calls. They're disruptive, intrusive, unreliable, and for many people with autism-spectrum disorders, extremely uncomfortable.

... And people who don't speak English so well.

Moreover if his customers truly prefer the phone, he could make giving the phone number optional and people would still give it out.

Google voice solves this pretty well... I get an email saying someone left a VM with the poor but adequate transcript.