Inside the heart of every customer support department there are two wolves. One is "do whatever we can to prevent them from phoning us: use every resource, every trick and every stalling measure to try to make sure they don't call". The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre".
> The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre".
I worked at a large insurance company and this was definitely the approach. There was a website, but you had to call to realistically get almost anything done.
One product manager's big innovation was to completely remove passwords. Every time you wanted to log in, you had reset the password and be sent a link via email. Of course the didn't announce this, so you would be probably spend 20 minutes frantically looking for your password that didn't exist.
