I would not recommend to call them by phone to contact them in the first attempt. Otherwise the average time of processing/solving (new and already existing) tickets will increase.
What do you have to do when you must pick up the phone? Right: Interrupt your current work.
On the other hand, in a 5 minute conversation I get more communication done than sending three e-mails back-and-forth. In the latter case I spend a lot longer typing the e-mails and reading the preceding messages. I guess it depends on what the support question is as to which method is going to be more efficient for everybody involved.
Yep, for example, if you need the other person to see something, you’ll have to take a picture and send it via email. In other cases calling is definitely more efficient.
Well, I would not like to get interrupted call by call by call, I just want to get my things done. (You may call me an inflexible person! 
)
Afaik they have different teams for calls and for emails. No interruptions there.
I’ve just finally had the opportunity to call up - I’ve been waiting 14 days for a response to replace my bottom module.
Anyway, all sorted and I’m told that there have been some ‘upgrades’ to the bottom module that should help ensure future stability.
It’s about time… An own article in the blog should be dedicated to this good news.
You are not really inflexible and you are right, of course. Every call is an interruption.
But you always have the choice to not pick up the phone.
And the uninterrupted workflow - I would guess - is not the way things will ever go in a support department.
E.g. there will be all kinds of new mails, while you are working on solving one of them.
Then you have to sort through them to place them with the correct case or/and assign them to the one working on it.
Lots of time will be spent on doing such stuff, that is not dedicated to solving problems. On the other hand you can in one call save lots of time for sorting, assigning and writing multiple mails in this special case. Therefore in the end it might be way more effective and time saving (for all) to give them a call.
I don’t like being critical of support - it’s a tough job and that’s the kind of thing I did for 10+ years. Often very thankless so I appreciate everything support does and I will refrain from complaining
My experience of support the last time my bottom module needed replacing though was that I put as much detail as possible into the ticket so that questions didn’t need asking but still after it was picked up I was asked to do diagnosis that I’d already done and documented - back then the emails were back and forth on the same day or the day after raising it so that was fine. However if I’d had an email back today on my ticket where I’ve been waiting 14 days+ for a response I wouldn’t have been happy at all.
To me it’s much smoother if you have a quick call rather than batting emails back and forth, it took less than a minute by phone to establish that I definitely needed a replacement part and a few moments more to place the order and confirm the address (Which would have been more emails back and forth to check your account and confirm back etc). Before the call ended I’d already had an email generated with the order for the replacement.
So, yeah I think given the delays in 1st response time (and that’s the figure we have, we don’t know the overall life-cycle to resolution time, and that could vary drastically depending upon the problem) it certainly helps from a customer experience perspective if there is a call to establish detail (whether that is customer initiated or FP initiated).
Edit: I forgot to actually state my main point - stripping waste time out of the process. A quick call has resolved the ticket in one. Otherwise there would be time spent emailing me back, delays in me emailing back (because I work or am away etc) and so on an so forth. There is therefore a lot of ‘re-work’ involved in having to read the ticket again to understand next steps and respond again. This therefore speeds up the process as now nobody needs to revisit my ticket (unless something goes drastically wrong with delivery). It’s a more time efficient model.
Stefan has told that afahk (as far as he knows) there are two teams: One for phone calls and one for written inquiries. I really hope it does not run like this:
Phone call team member receives inquiry and forwards it to a team member for written inquiries, generating even more work that has to be processed by the team…
And this is something I just do not understand. Although you sent a precisely written inquiry to them, trying to speed up the processing time as good as possible, they were not able to follow up in time. Nobody should have to give them a call just to repeat all these things again. It is all about organizing…
Ah yes, but when calling I didn’t have to confirm any of those things.
The point is that when you deal with a ticket purely as a ‘task’ you can try simply to get it out of your sight as quickly as possible.
When I call today, he quickly read the ticket and when I said I was calling on loudspeaker (also having forgotten I needed to switch to speaker initially), he simply moved on to confirm my address (which would have otherwise been an email anyway)
Why would a phone team member forward a phone inquiry to the mail team? 
After the member has created a new ticket in the system. (I have dealt with trouble tickets for almost ten years as a field service technician. 
)
From what @Chris_R says, the support person simply placed the order right away. No forwarding to the “email team”.
Then what does the “email team” do? (You may reply now that I should send a mail inquiry to them. 
)
Both teams handle support requests, only one handles those that come in via mail and one those that come in via call. What did you think?
Exactly: The phone team is able to handle inquiries without further delay, while the mail team does not follow up and obviously does not dig through the tickets, from the oldest to the newest.
Now, there is a very big delay the mail team has when it responds to inquiries. (Note, we are not talking about an acceptable final solution in regard to first contact reaction!) @Chris_R had a quite common inquiry the team should be skilled enough to cope with. But as far as I can see, I think there is a pattern when tickets with hardware failures arise. (Or in other words: “Let us just wait for some days, maybe we can find a working bottom module or a display before the customer gets angry!”)
I guess you all know what I am trying to say…
I have no idea actually.
Playing for time …