The Current TechnoRevolt: What’s OFF The Menu?

I’ve just spoken at a prestigious gathering of help desk professionals. These are the folks who you call within your own corporation when there’s some technical issue you can’t figure out, like how to uninstall the Space Invaders game your teen snuck onto your company laptop.

One of my fellow presenters took the stage and made this bold pronouncement: “Customers don’t like menus!”
Resounding applause broke out among the 2000 analysts and support center managers.

But, aren’t these the tech-geek folks who love “highly efficient” technology applications? Why were they applauding?

Because they’re also consumers, that’s why. Although engineers may design innovative applications for routing their customers’ calls, they detest encountering menu trees and voice recognition systems when they’re the ones who are doing the calling.

Here’s the point: Your best testing lab for what business practices will be popular with your customers is probably… yourself. If you hate navigating through a long list of menu options when you call for help, and then resent having to speak or key in your account number, only to have a human rep (eventually) answer and start off by asking for your account number, well, your customers probably won’t like it, either.

This reminds me of a speech I gave for another gathering of call center professionals. I called it “Let’s Quit Seducing Ourselves and Terrorizing Our Customers.” It wasn’t well-received. Addressing an audience of technical experts who dreamed up and designed the multi-tiered menus we all hate, I essentially said, “You’ve been seduced by your technical capabilities, and what you’re doing is terrorizing callers.”

There was no outbreak of unrestrained applause. Maybe because I presented the talk in 2001. It was too soon. It was still sort of fascinating and novel that you could punch in a series of answers and have your call handled automatically. (“If you’re calling with a question about your account, press 3. For questions about a charge on your most recent bill, press 7,” and so on.)

Are you still fascinated with this technology? Are you noticing the trend in advertising lately: “Our company is better than the other guys because we have people who answer the phone and actually talk to you.”

You’ve surely heard about the “cheat sheet” on the internet (http://gethuman.com/us/) that gives you the secret codes to bypass companies’ sophisticated phone systems. It’s wildly popular because consumers are absolutely fed up with call automation.

This whole state of affairs was completely avoidable. At some executive conference table a few years back where the amazing efficiencies of automated call routing were being touted, one person with clout just had to stand up and say, “Our customers aren’t going to like this. I know because I don’t like this. Sure, we CAN implement this technology, but we shouldn’t.”

I’m not blogging to rant about automatic call routing systems that are so poorly implemented that they spawn a backlash anti-tech ad campaigns and fuel widespread frustration, if not anger. I’m writing to urge you to use common sense when you decide what technologies to implement in your own company. Stand up for common sense.

My company is named “Speaking From Experience” for just this reason. What I do is pay attention to how I react as a customer. When some organization comes up with a great idea, I spread it around. I met a really smart dentist endowed with marketing brilliance and common sense who just installed WiFi in his dental offices. Patients can now arrive early for their appointments, bring their laptops, and get online while they wait. Great idea. Cost: fifty bucks. Every dentist should to it.

And when some company gets seduced by its own technologically-possible but stupid idea, I speak up.

You can, too. Please do.

--
To download the original “Terror and Seduction” article I published in 2001, follow this link:
http://www.georgewalther.com/articles/a_terror.pdf

--