Companies might be happy to ring you in the middle of dinner, but they're noticeably less keen to make it easy for you to call them. At APC, Dan Warne reports that Telstra is about to shift most of its BigPond support centre to the Philippines, and is adding a interactive voice recognition (IVR) troubleshooting system you have to navigate before reaching a real person. Based on the sample call provided in the story, it doesn't work very well, but these kind of approaches are becoming more common. (I had a similarly frustrating experience with Vodafone's 'Lara' recently, and it ultimately diverted me to the wrong division anyway.) Are you happy to deal with IVR services if they get the job done more quickly, or are they just another pain in the neck? How could they be improved? Speak out in the comments. If you don't want to deal with a call centre, you could always try BigPond support via Twitter.

Telstra's BigPond Internet division has added a support channel on Twitter, allowing you to raise problems through the popular social network. Though most of the responses to date seem to effectively devolve to "a BigPond consultant will email U back", it's another weapon to keep in the support arsenal.

If you've returned home from the holidays having evangelised to your friends and family about the wonders of Firefox, you'll be thrilled to know that Mozilla has just launched a new live chat support service. The support staff is volunteer-only (they're just kind Firefox users looking to lend a hand) and support is not 24 hours, but what a great bookmark for that new Firefox installation you added to your parents' computer—or your own.