Perspective from another source
Caroline Baum is not involved with technology except as a user. She is a well-known financial commentator and writer for Bloomberg. Her professional expertise is the Federal Reserve, not Microsoft so I find her comments about computer subjects to be very interesting as an example of a savvy but non-technical computer user. Here is what a highly educated, very intelligent computer user says in a list of her major gripes of 2006:
Reboot-erama
Personal computers have been around for three decades, yet “rebooting” is still the first line of defense when it comes to troubleshooting those incomprehensible dialog boxes that pop up seemingly at random.
Computers have gotten faster, bigger (or smaller, if that’s your preference) and better, yet they still have more glitches than they should given that PCs are in their fourth or fifth generation.
Your Father’s Buick
Why can’t computers work as well as cars? You change the oil, take it in for its manufacturer-recommended check-ups and have very few problems that aren’t externally induced. Your father’s Buick ran better than your PC.
Personally, I might not have chosen the automoble as an example. Maybe the TV is a closer analogy but her point is on the mark. The consumer wants an appliance that works with low maintenance and simple operation, not a complex box with numerous technical facets that the user must learn.
About customer service from the Internet and elsewhere she laments:
1. “Contact Us”
Never have two words been used so widely to convey the opposite. Web sites implore customers to “contact us,” but the truth is, they don’t want to hear from you. Ever. If they did, they wouldn’t make it so damned hard to find the icon that allows you to e-mail them with a question or check up on an order.
Wanted: Real Person
The Internet business model — selling things cheaper than bricks-and-mortar stores, with the added inducement of no tax (unless there’s a physical store in your state) and sometimes free shipping — only makes sense if a company can reduce its labor costs. Customer service, an oxymoron on its way to extinction (see No. 2 below), is still best performed by a real person, although that presumption gets challenged every day.
2. Customer Service
“Your call is very important to us. Calls may be monitored for quality control.”
Please, please let a quality-control representative be listening in so that just maybe I can get the problem resolved!
Consumers got wise to the fact that they could avoid several rounds of phone-menu options by hitting “0” immediately. Then companies got wiser still, invalidating the zero option. (“I’m sorry, that option is not available.”)
Consumers then one-upped the companies by publishing an extensive list of short-cuts to help the consumer expedite his quest for a real, live operator at various companies. (Your move, companies.)
Just as a reminder, here’s a previous post about finding live help.
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