Should companies have phones?

I’m reading an interview with Paul English, Co-Founder of Kayak.

He has some innovative ideas for running a company. Here are a couple:

The Red Phone: Paul found the most obnoxious, loud-ringing red phone he could find and plugged it in right in the engineering office.� About 30% of the time, when a Kayak web visitor saw a support phone number on the website, it was the number of�that phone. The idea was to build a culture that was centered around the customer.

…

If you visit Kayak.com and hit the feedback button, you will get a response via email.� Kayak responds, individually, to�every email.� That�s impressive.� What is crazy-impressive is that the email response comes from either Paul or someone on the engineering team.� He gets flack for using a $150k/engineer to answer support emails when the rest of the world is outsourcing it for $8/hour or something.� Why does he do this?� Because, when engineers respond to support issues, when the same issues arise time and time again, they are more likely to stop what they are doing�and go fix the problem so that they don�t have to answer that�same question again.� And, because it sends a message to the entire team that they take these issues very seriously.