In this blog entry, I talked about using a phone number to establish credibility for your home-based business. You can also provide a phone number to differentiate your home business from larger, less personal companies who don't want to provide easily accessible phone numbers.
At least for the foreseeable future, phones in one form or another aren't going away. And I think that customers are going to want to call and speak with someone sometimes and businesses can't rely on their websites to provide answers for everything.
I think a lot of larger companies might disagree. I was reminded of this today as I was trying to find a phone number for Yahoo! billing. I was having a puzzling billing issue with one of our Yahoo! directory listings and needed to speak with someone about it. Do you think I could find a phone number anywhere on Yahoo!? No, and apparently I'm not the only one. It appears that an entire forum was established at SupportSentry for Yahoo! customer service issues and the forum introduction has this to say:
We receive customer service requests for Yahoo and Yahoo's phone number all of the time. We decided, after receiving hundreds of emails complaining about Yahoo and requesting Yahoo's phone number, to put up this forum where people can voice their opinions, vent their frustrations and share information. As of this writing, we do not have Yahoo's customer service phone number, but I am sure that someone will post it here soon.
http://www.contacthelp.com/directory/Internet/Web+Sites/Yahoo?ListingID=148 ...