The human nature of phone support permits social engineering. People have lost their phone numbers (and thus 2FA for their Coinbase or whatnot) via a targeted attack at their cell phone carriers' support lines, calling over and over until one rep buckles at the well-crafted sob story and overrides something.
I cannot imagine the magnitude of bullshit such a line would have to process. Posting it to HN would probably be faster and more effective in almost any case.
Automated support doesn’t come close to the breadth and depth of support you can get just by talking to people. If a support document or link doesn’t exist for your concern, and you can’t talk to a person, then you are just SOL and subject to an algorithmic black box you can never understand nor reason with.
The sort of phone support Google would offer on a phone line would be the same sort of "algorithmic black box", just with a human voice. Call a major bank, airline, or utility provider to experience the fun of it.
Experienced it recently with UPS in fact. They’re a trash organization with no respect for their customers that make Comcast look like a shining beacon of humanity.
That said, I fairly regularly deal with phone support for different companies because when push comes to shove to varying degrees of success, I want a human on the other end to deal with my problem. Rarely do I regret taking that path.
The human nature of phone support permits social engineering. People have lost their phone numbers (and thus 2FA for their Coinbase or whatnot) via a targeted attack at their cell phone carriers' support lines, calling over and over until one rep buckles at the well-crafted sob story and overrides something.
I cannot imagine the magnitude of bullshit such a line would have to process. Posting it to HN would probably be faster and more effective in almost any case.