I would imagine that most people who call are doing so because the "online help" can't help them. People want their problem fixed as quickly as possible, no-one wants to call a call centre.

I would actually expect support calls to be more bimodal between customers who use them as a last resort or first resort. If I'm calling support for something then I have probably already tried everything within my power. But there are absolutely people who will call as the first step, for a variety of reasons (maybe they're too technologically illiterate to even approach the problem, or maybe they feel like being a customer entitles them to technical support, which isn't totally unjustified).

> I would imagine that most people who call are doing so because the "online help" can't help them.

Based on the anecdata I have, this is very false.

My brother used to work tech support for X-Box Live. He said 80% of his calls were for password resets, something anybody could self-service in less time than it takes to find the customer support phone number.

Sure, there were cases where they no longer had access to the original e-mail address on the account, or cases where he was sure someone was trying to social engineer their way into someone else's account by claiming a forgotten password, but generally, he'd just trigger the password reset e-mail and the customer was able to reset their password.

At one point, he tried going off-script to tell people to select the "Forgot Password" option and walk them through the self-service, but he got in trouble for it.