Sense with Cents

From the 80s through the 90s — the DOS days and the early Windows days — phone support was a big deal. Call Medlin before 1993 and you would get Jerry on the line. Starting in 1993, you would get me. No phone tree, no ticket number, no offshore script reader. Just the guy who wrote the software.

It was fun. We got to know customers. We would talk about payroll, sure, but also about the weather, their kids, their business. Some calls ran long because we wanted them to.

Over the phone, Bemidji, Minnesota became a real place to me. I had played an early PC curling game years ago, so I was, at the time, one of the few people in California who even knew what curling was — which gave us something to talk about beyond software. For many years, Bemidji was the US city with the most Medlin customers, sometimes getting surpassed by our own city. All of it traces back to one customer there who liked our software and handed sample disks to others.

That is the part of phone support that is easy to miss when you focus on the inefficiencies. A customer who feels known is a customer who tells others. You did not get to “most Medlin customers in the country” from a ticket system.

But it worked for a reason that doesn’t exist anymore.

Everyone was an expert

Back then, if you owned a computer, you were a computer expert. You had to be. Nobody was calling because they couldn’t find the Start button — there wasn’t one yet. And if you were running payroll software, you already knew payroll. You weren’t learning the job from the manual.

So a support call was peer to peer. Two experts talking shop. I didn’t have to explain what a directory was, and they didn’t need me to explain what a 941 was. We could get straight to the actual question.

Then the shift started. I once asked a caller to insert the floppy disk with their thumb on the label side, close the drive door, and let me know when it was done. What I heard next was footsteps, then a door closing somewhere in the house. Years later, I had someone ask, in all seriousness, whether I wanted them to put the install disk in their computer’s cup holder. They meant the CD tray.

Neither caller was foolish. They were smart people doing their jobs. They just weren’t computer experts anymore, and they weren’t supposed to have to be. The computer had stopped being a tool for hobbyists and started being an appliance. That is a good thing for the world. It is a hard thing for phone support.

I have a longtime local friend who, to this day, will ask me where the “Any” key is. At this point I am pretty sure he is doing it on purpose.

Then computers became appliances

Email arrived. Windows matured. Computers stopped being a hobby and started being a kitchen toaster. That is mostly a good thing — more people got work done. But the support calls changed.

Now the questions were about the task itself, or the hardware itself. Neither one works well over the phone. Try walking someone through a printer problem without seeing their screen. Try teaching payroll fundamentals in a twenty-minute call. It doesn’t land.

And a phone call leaves no trail. No written path to follow later. No copy to forward to the bookkeeper. No reference to pull up next quarter when the same question comes around. We would hang up and the answer evaporated.

Email fits the work better

Today, the easy stuff is handled inside the software. What is left splits about in half. Common questions have stock replies we have refined over years — accurate, tested, and tailored in seconds. Unique questions need an expert writing step-by-step instructions, and that kind of answer needs to be composed carefully, not improvised on a call.

Email does a few things a phone call never could. More than one person can be looped in — the bookkeeper, the business owner, the CPA — all reading the same answer, at the same time, with nothing lost in translation. It works off hours. A question sent at 9 PM may have an answer waiting at 7 AM. And the answer itself is laid out in plain language with very specific instructions, in order, that you can follow step by step without trying to remember what was said forty minutes ago.

It also respects everyone’s time. The customer writes the question when it is fresh, hits send, and goes back to their day. I answer when I am in support mode — not when the phone yanks me out of whatever I was doing. Usually within an hour. Worst case, same day or next business morning.

There is also a shortcut worth knowing about. AI is here. You can ask an AI tool a question about Medlin and it will likely have the answer, or at least point you in the right direction — because it has read everything we have written in public. That is not a replacement for writing to us when you need a specific answer. But for the kinds of questions you would have spent ten minutes on hold to ask, it is often faster than either of us.

And one more thing on the reply itself: it is often from me, the person who wrote the software. If it is not, it is from someone I have worked with closely enough that they can answer on their own, using the same written references and documentation I built.

A phone call is binary — and the day goes with it

In the old days, I was on the phone the entire day, often with less than productive results. The caller would want to keep me on the line while they tried something. Then they would put me on hold while they tended to something else. Twenty minutes would go by with nothing happening. Then another call would come in, and another, and the day was gone.

We also spent a fair amount of time debating software functions and tax rules. The software debates were at least useful — some of them made the program better. The tax rule debates were somewhat pointless. Tax rules change constantly, and no amount of back-and-forth on the phone settles anything that a quick look at the current IRS publication wouldn’t settle better. An email exchange on the same question leaves a link to the actual source, in writing, that both sides can refer to later. A phone debate leaves two people with slightly different memories of what was said.

The work of actually improving the software — the thing that helps every customer, not just the one on the line — was what got pushed to after hours.

A phone call is one person, one task, everything else on hold. Email lets both sides keep moving. More on how to write a good support email in Help Me Help You.

And one thing worth saying plainly: our support has always been, and still is, free. No support contracts, no per-incident fees, no premium tier. That has not changed. What changed is the channel — because the channel is what made the help itself better.

The bottleneck moved

Many of us had fifty-foot phone cords so we could reach the wall socket from somewhere useful. Mine had to make it up a flight of stairs. Same idea as the long-cord wall phone most of us grew up with — the one that let you sit on the couch, or hide in the closet if you wanted to pretend you had privacy. That was the infrastructure of a phone conversation. You were physically tied to a jack in the wall.

On top of that, in the old days we had to use software to compress our messages and send them in batches to save on long distance charges and online access time. You would queue up your email, dial in, shove it all through the pipe at once, and hang up before the per-minute meter ran too high. Internet for everyone changed that. The pipe stopped being the limit, and so did the wall jack.

The smart watch on your wrist has more computing power than the machines I learned on. My first personal computer was a Panasonic Sr. Partner — a “portable” luggable with two 5.25-inch floppy drives, a built-in thermal printer, and an optional ten megabyte hard drive if you wanted to get fancy. It weighed thirty-one pounds. The word “portable” was working hard. The receipt showed close to $3,000 in 1984 dollars as equipped. Mine was a hand-me-down from a family member who no longer needed it, which was the only way I was getting one. Today’s watch beats that machine on every measure — memory, storage, processing power — by orders of magnitude. It also makes calls, reads you your calendar, and composes messages from spoken instructions. Not many people, if any, can type faster than they can speak. The keyboard bottleneck most of us grew up working around is no longer an issue.

I am currently testing a ring as a replacement for my beloved trackball. Once I get used to the gestures, my hand will not have to move to the mouse at all — it pairs naturally with voice commands replacing the keyboard. The trend is consistent: every few years, another tether between me and the work gets cut.

So the old argument for phone support — that the phone was simply faster than anything else — does not hold up anymore. Email is faster now, for most questions, for most people. Dictate the question, hit send, move on. The answer is waiting when you come back to it, written down, in order, and still there next month.

We tried chat and texting, too

It is fair to ask: if the point is to avoid the phone, why not online chat, or text messaging? We tried both. They wasted too much of our time and, more importantly, too much of our customers’ time.

The problem is the medium itself. Chat and texting reward short. People fire off a fragment, wait a beat, fire off another fragment, and we spend the exchange trying to piece together what is actually being asked. By the time we know enough to help, everyone is already tired of the conversation. For support work, verbose is king. The fuller the first message, the faster the right answer comes back. Email invites people to think, compose, and send a complete question. Chat invites them to type half of one.

One question, ten customers

There is another thing written support does that the phone never could: it is easy to search. Every email we send and receive is a record we can come back to later — not just to answer the same customer again, but to look for patterns.

When we see a trend, we often take action to prevent the need for anyone else to ask the same thing. Sometimes we add a tooltip. Sometimes we change the wording of an on-screen message. Sometimes we restructure a whole feature so the question stops coming up in the first place. A trend does not have to be large to count. Even a single message can be the start of one, because we assume every question we get represents ten customers — the one who asked, and at least nine others who hit the same wall and either figured it out, worked around it, or gave up without writing in.

That ratio is a guess, not a measurement. But it is the right guess to make, because the cost of being wrong in that direction is nothing, and the cost of being wrong the other way is letting a bad pattern live in the software. The phone could not give us any of this. A phone call ended and the insight ended with it.

The review problem phone support couldn’t solve

There is a dark side worth mentioning. Online reviews.

A review is whatever the writer wants it to be. If the exchange was a phone call, we had nothing on our end to check it against — no record of what was actually said. With email, we do.

Good review? We usually know who wrote it, and we can thank them personally. Bad review? So be it. We apologize where we should and try to do better.

The hard part is the fake ones. There is one out there — probably still live somewhere — where the gist was that we charged the person $50 for help. That is not what happened. The person wanted us to do something for them, which is not a service we offer, and the bad review was leverage to get us to change our minds. Because we had the email thread, we could respond with what actually happened instead of just our side of a he-said-she-said.

Fake or unfair reviews are painful — in dollars, in time, and in feelings. But we have noticed the bad reviews tend to be the most-read ones, and they often seem to push sales up rather than down. Our guess is that honest responses are worth more than a clean five-star average.

We still care — we just write it down

Ending phone support in 2019 was not about caring less. It was about actually helping more. The 80s-and-90s era of phone support — when it really was the best channel we had — was over long before we stopped picking up the phone. We kept it going another couple of decades out of habit and loyalty. The loyalty part is worth keeping. The habit part was not. The written answer is better. It is searchable, forwardable, and it is still there six months later when you need it again. That same principle — keeping current, not standing still — shows up in Learning or Declining.

I do miss the phone days sometimes. It was easy to share stories, wander a bit, catch up on a customer’s life between actual questions. Written support doesn’t do that as naturally. But written support does something the phone never could: it builds a reference. Every thoughtful reply becomes a piece of material that can teach the next person — a customer, a new support helper, eventually whoever replaces me. The phone call helped one person once. The written answer helps everyone who asks the same question from now on.

What direct support actually offers is the nuances. The things you cannot glean from a manual. The judgment calls that only make sense after you have seen them play out a few hundred times. Life experience, applied to your specific situation. A manual tells you what the rule is. An AI tool can tell you what the rule is, faster. Direct support tells you whether the rule matters in your case, which exception you are about to walk into, and what the three customers who tried the same thing last year ended up doing instead. That is not stuck in my head anymore — we are slowly and deliberately getting it into writing — but it is the part that still makes writing in worthwhile.

See also: Who Writes In, the Names That Stay — and What’s Next, Help Me Help You, and Learning or Declining.