Ask HN: Do you think phone support is needed?

Today our payment processor shut us down w/o much, if any, warning and a very vague reason. To make matters worse, though we made several attempts to contact them we got zero help. I did eventually contact a staffer via Twitter who told me 'someone was looking into it' but that was it. So we spent the day checking email, twitter, and logs looking for some sort of sign that we're back up. Not fun...

Putting aside we were down for a day, and the fact we've done around .5M of business with them so far this year, we have no way of contacting them via phone.

I've been a champion of the concept of not providing phone support, instead use email - providing email is fast and reliable. However, after today I'm having second thoughts.

Over the last few years I've seen more and more substantially successful companies not offering phone support. This idea has been interesting to me as I think its not only cool but efficient.

For instance, in many cases phone support may be just a place for a customer to take out their frustrations, not really helping matters or delivering a solution any quicker. In my experience I often can help people out quicker via email because it saves me the emotional drama.

However, I think in order for this to be successful, email or web chat support needs to be efficient. I'm talking turn-around time in minutes not hours or worse yet days.

Even if a solution can't be resolved quickly, a customer should be notified that the issue is being worked on. Metaphorically speaking, not doing such is like not providing a spinner or progress bar when doing a lengthy web request. It builds tension - tension needs resolved.

That being said - more companies seem to be doing this. I'm asking the HN community on their opinion of this trend. Perhaps this will shed light on the concept and spike those doing it to be speedier on their emails ;-).

Do you think phone support is needed?