When I was in college, I worked at a bakery and actually made some long-term friends by talking to customers that came into the store. I later used this job experience to get an email support job, answering questions that users had about our software plugin. Never made any long-term friends with customers there, even if they emailed us once a month.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.
There's also the fact that, email / online support leave records. You really don't want to leave a written record of you asking someone about their life, as when/if it gets audited - you can possibly get into trouble.
Who said anything about GDPR? If someone reveals to you that they are in some kind of protected class, then there’s a risk that anything you do they don’t like could see you tagged for discrimination even if it’s how you’d treat any customer in the same situation.
If you have evidence it's the usual approach (e.g. written policy documents, aggregate statistics), then it should be fine. If it's a situation that only comes up for certain demographics, and you handle it poorly such that members of those demographics consistently have a worse time than everyone else, then that might be a legitimate discrimination issue even if there's no malice intended.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.