The best part is the claim that most people _still_ won't call, which I'm quite prepared to believe, although there are other hypotheses that would explain his experience. I wonder if one could devise a way to break out the number of people who choose a company based on their contactability, but never call on the phone, from those who don't care and/or would always use email anyway. Maybe get two rival businesses (in the same market) to do a post-purchase user-satisfaction survey? But there's still a boatload of confounds even if you can get two rivals to agree to it. It's so hard to do good science on messy real-life human interactions. :)
I spend a lot of time researching software and technologies for my clients. Many times there are two or more candidates that are very close in usability, features, cost, but if one of them has a posted phone number with easy to reach people on the other end of that phone line, they are more likely to get my recommendation.
