[lazyasciiart]

I have been in a meeting where the weird nerd is saying "our company should completely ditch customer support phone lines and only use a chat service because I don't know anyone who wants to make a phone call". This company was a utility that had customers with every level of literacy and internet access. He was mindbogglingly wrong, because he had no idea there was information in the world that he hadn't come across. It's very common - so common it's called engineer syndrome.

[bsder]

And, ironically, I had the exact opposite conversation where we kept paying money to fund customer support phone lines that had one call in 6 months because the sales and marketing team couldn't conceive of the fact that nobody under 30 (our primary demographic) wanted to use voice anymore and were screaming for an app/webapp chat of some form.

Not knowing your customers isn't unique to engineers.

[randomdata]

> He was mindbogglingly wrong

How do you know?

Studies already suggest that 9 out of 10 people prefer text communication with businesses. Of the remaining 10%, we have to establish that they:

1. Prefer the phone over other alternatives. Some may want face-to-face communication, for example.

2. Want to phone a utility in the first place. Preferring phone communication over other means does not imply that they want to communicate.

3. That the person of which you speak knows of them. Someone who really does want to phone a utility, but is not known by said person, would not meet the qualifications defined.

Unless you actually compiled a list of those he knows and surveyed them in a good faith standing, you can't know. The statistics are not in your favour, though. It is quite unlikely that he does know someone who wants to make a phone call to said utility. Perhaps your weird nerdiness has clouded seeing that?

[lazyasciiart]

No, we don’t have to establish that he knows them. It doesn’t matter if he is right about the people he knows: he is wrong about the customer base and the business decision.

[TeMPOraL]

Ironically, that's what the companies have been doing for the past few years, by having people talk to voice assistant "AI"s instead of humans.

Hell, you could argue the process started much earlier: before voice assistants came DTMF phone menus with automated recordings; before that came outsourcing customer support to cheapest labor available - which is like hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line, except with protein robots paid peanuts and worked to the bone instead.