No one relishes the thought of having to phone up a support agent to have their issue resolved. The long hold times, the endless maze of menu options, and the dread of getting transferred to a dizzying stream of agents and having to retell your story every single time. Ugh.

But guess what? Companies don't relish the thought of phone support either.

As the infographic below shows, the cost of phone support and building out traditional call centers is expensive. The average cost of an inbound call is $5.90. Sounds pretty low, until you consider that call centers on average field about 45.4 billion calls per year. And as their company grows and their number of support agents increases, it can be difficult to scale the kind of personal customer support they had at the beginning. Plus, building out call center can often take months to get ramped up and require and intense amount of training.

Yet, phone support continues to be the most popular support channel. Customers continue to have more faith that a live human being can help them more than anything else. And organizations know that phone support is a support channel they can't ignore. It's more trustworthy and makes it easy for customers to talk through what can be complex and technical issues. Fortunately, Zendesk Talk is resolving the decades-long battle of making phone support an enjoyable, efficient, satisfying, and even fun experience. Yes, we said fun. It might be the most traditional channel for support, but it's finally time for having an untraditional way of tackling the enigma of how to provide successful phone support. Because phone support isn't going anywhere.

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<img title="Call Centers Infographic" src="https://zendesk-zengage.s3.amazonaws.com/Infographic/11.08.23_Zendesk_CallCenters-01.jpg" alt="Call Centers Infographic" width="615" />

<pre><em>Image originally posted on <a href="https://www.zendesk.com/blog/call-centers-are-here-to-stay">Zengage, The Zendesk Blog</a></em>

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