Why We Trialled Phone Support — And Why We're Not Rolling It Out

We know a lot of you have asked about phone support over the years, both before signing up and as existing customers. It's one of our more common requests, and we genuinely understood why. Being able to pick up the phone and speak to someone feels like the fastest route to getting something sorted. We wanted to see if that was actually the case.

So we ran a trial. You might have noticed it in your sidebar! Here's what happened, and what we're doing instead.

What We Did

Over a two-week period, we A/B tested phone support with a portion of our customer base. Sarah and I personally handled every call — no outsourced call centre, no script readers. The same people who build and maintain BookingNinja were the ones picking up the phone.

We wanted to give it a fair shot. If phone support was going to work for us and for you, this was the way to find out.

What We Found

We took 106 calls during the trial. The average call lasted 22 minutes, which is a decent chunk of time by anyone's measure. But here's what surprised us: calls rarely ended with a clear resolution.

That wasn't because we didn't care or weren't trying. It's because of the nature of what most calls were actually about.

BookingNinja has hundreds of configuration options. When something isn't working the way you expect, it usually comes down to a setting choice — sometimes one made weeks or months ago. Figuring that out means going through your configuration, pulling up logs, and tracing back through data. That takes time, concentration, and often a fair bit of back-and-forth.

On the phone, there's pressure to give you an answer quickly. And the honest truth is that a quick answer in these situations is often the wrong answer. We'd rather take the time to get it right than give you something that sounds confident but sends you down the wrong path.

The calls that weren't about configuration were almost always feature requests — which are valuable conversations, but they don't need to happen in real time on a phone line.

The Numbers Were Honest Too

Customer satisfaction during the trial was no higher than what we already achieve through LiveChat. That was a telling result. If phone support was delivering a better experience, we'd have leaned into it regardless of the cost. But it wasn't.

We also found that 10% of the customers exposed to the trial accounted for roughly 80% of the total phone support time — the same customers calling repeatedly. That's not a criticism of those customers. But it does highlight that phone support, in practice, doesn't scale evenly. A small number of users would absorb the majority of the resource, which means less time for everyone else.

And because Sarah and I handle everything — development, onboarding, support, the lot — every call that came in broke the flow of whatever else we were working on. Some of that "whatever else" was building features you've asked for, fixing things you've reported, and onboarding new venues. We have to be honest about those trade-offs.

We Know What You're Thinking

"If you're a serious platform, why can't I just ring someone?"

Fair question. But we'd push back gently: serious support isn't about the channel, it's about the outcome. We've reduced our average support queue by nearly 75% in the past year. When you reach us on LiveChat, you're talking to the people who built the system. We can pull up your account, check your configuration, review logs, test things — and get back to you with an answer that's actually right, not just fast.

Some of the biggest platforms in the world have moved away from phone support, and not because they're too cheap to offer it. It's because they've learned the same thing we found: for complex products, phone often isn't the best medium for resolution.

What We're Doing Instead

We're not standing still. If anything, this trial has pushed us to invest harder in the channels that genuinely get you better results.

Ad-hoc calls are still available. If you need to talk something through with us, you can book a call via LiveChat. These aren't "drop everything" interruptions — they're scheduled so we can come prepared, with your account pulled up and context in hand. That means the call is actually productive.

WhatsApp support is coming. We're actively building a WhatsApp support channel. We know that not everyone wants to sit in a LiveChat window, and WhatsApp gives you the flexibility to message us and get on with your day while we work on your query. More details on this soon.

Better documentation, fewer support queries. We're expanding our help docs and actively reworking the areas of BookingNinja that generate the most support questions. The goal is straightforward: make things clear enough that you don't need to contact us in the first place. That 75% reduction in support queue times didn't happen by accident — it happened because we've been simplifying flows and filling in the gaps. That work continues.

The Bigger Picture

We could have rolled out phone support and marketed it as a feature. But we'd have been doing it for the wrong reasons, to tick a box rather than to actually improve your experience. That's not how we make decisions at BookingNinja.

We'd rather be honest with you: phone support, as we trialled it, didn't deliver better outcomes than what we already offer. And the resource it consumed would have come directly out of development time, onboarding capacity, and support quality for everyone else.

We'll keep looking at new ways to support you. If something works, we'll roll it out. If it doesn't, we'll tell you why. That's the deal.