aasauer In my opinion the question doesnât address the important issue, which is response times. Many companies have phone support but well you call them you get to wait for an hour and then itâll hang up because of either random phone line issues or itâll just say âAll our agents are busy. Please try again later.â
Regardless of voice or text-based support, as long as there is enough staff to adress your issue quickly, I think pretty much everyone would be happy. Text-based chat has a few advantages over voice though imo:
- You automatically get a transcript of your interaction with support. Useful for referencing. And being able to send images, videos etc. can be very helpful.
- It has better accessibility for people with certain impairments.
- The customer doesnât need to âbusy waitâ. Instead they can open a ticket and do something else while they wait on an answer. Harder to do with phone calls.
- The ticket system in and of itself makes it possible to group support interactions by issue. (Currently at bunq this is not always really possible because support will often close a ticket for you.)
- Text chat in the app can be fully encrypted. The phone system is inherently insecure. (You could also build a voice call system into the app to mitigate this weakness, but itâs more of an engineering challenge than text-based communication.)
- Not just confidentiality of phone calls, but also authentication during phone calls is something most companies havenât solved. Iâm sure bunq can do better but question would be will they really. For many companies, phone support is a huge attack vector via social engineering.
- Less staff is needed to provide text-based support to the same number of customers with the same response times.
Thatâs how I think about it. Therefore, I think money should get mainly allocated to hiring more support staff instead of building out a good voice call-based support system.
That is to say, Iâm not against it or anything. As soon as bunq is able to provide efficient, safe & secure phone support, without compromising anywhere else, I donât see a particularly reason for not developing the idea further. And some people might just like the human element of it. đ¤
