Why can’t I call Gust on the phone?
While we do have phones at Gust, and there are living breathing people dutifully working away at making your life easier - we do not have a dedicated phone support line. Instead we use an asynchronous customer communications tool called Intercom as our main point of contact with customers.
We know this can sometimes be awkward or inconvenient for those that prefer to work over the phone, so we wrote up a little bit about why we’ve made the decision not to offer a direct phone line for support. Ultimately, it’s because we believe we can offer better service to all our customers by not maintaining dedicated phone support. Here’s how it breaks down:
Gust is an "all hands on deck" organization. Everyone from our CEO to our technical team are customer facing and everyone spends time fielding customer questions and issues. Intercom allows us to manage that process seamlessly and transfer context across teams without making you repeat yourself.
Phone support doesn’t scale as well as chat and email. Using Intercom we can help more people, faster, and with fewer resources. Intercom allows us to link out to FAQs, use screenshots, and provide navigation links which we can't do over the phone.
If possible, we’d like to avoid putting anyone on hold. The Intercom chat box has the advantage that you can send us a message, and even if you navigate away from Gust, we’ll still get it and be able to follow up with you by email. We always have someone from our team answering Intercom tickets during business hours, and wait times are not usually more than 15 minutes. So if you need help fast, letting us know in our chat is the best way to get it.
With a written response, you can engage with it at your own pace at a time that makes sense for you. You can follow support instructions or make decisions about how to best move forward without an idle agent waiting on the line with you. When you're ready to pick the conversation back up, or if you have questions, the chat is still there waiting for you.
Our chat system gives us data about what you’re doing in our app. Along with your question or the description of the issue you’re experiencing, having information about what plan you’re on, when you last logged in, or what pages you’ve visited paints a much clearer picture for us on how we can best assist you. In the time spent gathering this information and getting up to speed in a phone call, chances we often could have already answered a question or solved the problem if we had the context we glean from a chat.
When talking about things like software workflows, or legal documents, phone instructions lend themselves to being misheard, misunderstood, or forgotten. Your company's legal docs are important, so we prefer writing out instructions because we can double-check them or backtrack to see where we went wrong to correct any errors.
In the most complex cases, we probably can’t give you an answer right away even if we were to be on the phone with you. We usually need to look at your account, do a bit of research, and make some notes to get a full picture of the issue you're experiencing.
Even in urgent cases, starting customer interactions out over chat means someone will be available more quickly. If we're not tied up on the line with something that can easily be resolved by sending an FAQ article or a link, we have better availability for the five alarm issues.
Phone calls are great for certain kinds of communication, and we know there are going to be circumstances where speaking with you on a call is the most logical and efficient way to get you a resolution. We’re happy to jump on a call when appropriate, but we do ask that you try to provide your question or a quick description of your problem through email or chat first so that we can arrange for the appropriate person at Gust to take the call.