Comment by Sohcahtoa82

Three things are true:

1. Most customers seeking support could solve their problem easily through self-service methods.

2. Some customers are running into edge cases that truly need a human to solve, and they should be able to get access to a human.

3. Making a human easy to get to results in a lot of people who are actually in group 1 but think they're in group 2 costing a lot of money in support staffing costs.

The anecdote I like to give is from my brother previously working at XBox Live support. 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something everyone could easily self-service right from the login page. These weren't "I tried that but I don't have access to the e-mail address I used anymore" cases[0], but the simple case. He'd trigger the password reset e-mail, the user would see the e-mail, and go through the reset flow. These users did not need a human, but were convinced they did, despite there literally being a "Forgot password?" button/link on every login page.

My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.

I get it though, sometimes you really DO need a human, but how do you make it easy to get a human when you need one without making it too easy to get one when you really and truly don't?

[0] Those DID happen, but were exceptionally rare, and a significant number of those calls were probably people trying to break into someone else's account.