Bragging Rights That Lose Customers
Bragging about how good your call center is doesn’t give potential customers the warm and fuzzies about your product or service. Making things easy for prospects makes it easy for them to become customers.
It took a while to find, but the story of the early TV set marketing during the 1950s is instructive. While US manufacturers stressed the serviceability of their products, along with extensive networks of service centers, the Japanese worked hard to make serviceability a liability by making their products more reliable. Eliminating the need for a TV repairman was something that customers certainly liked. No surprise then that TV manufacturing in the US disappeared, along with that large servicing and repair infrastructure.
A recent health insurance pitch stressed the quality of their call center, glossing over the Byzantine complexity of the policy as written. Certainly not very comforting. Among other things, it reinforces a sense of dependence on their internal operations, not to say convenience, leaving the policy holders few, if any, tools to determine and decide items and actions for themselves. Oddly, most, perhaps all, insurance carriers accept this complexity as part of the natural order of things. We see it as a way to create uncertainty and justification of high prices.
Making things simple is certainly not easy, particularly things based of software, which isn’t effected by such things as gravity. Steve Jobs’ Paradox, about making things simple requires a lot of complexity, is an ideal that seldom is achieved in practice: Software certainly gets more complex, but seldom simple to use.
Nothing new in this, been known for some time. What does seem new is the shifting to yet another bottleneck, relying on call centers to, somehow, sorting things out by using the customer as the final test station.
It may take a lot of work to make any product simple to use, but the advantages are compelling. Eliminating the expense of a call center certainly helps control the overhead; having happy customers that recommend the product to others is a golden dividend on that initial investment.
© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
A Word From Our Sponser
Adding Security And Eliminating CAPTCHAs Increases Email Optin Rates with An Adobe Flex object that is yours for the asking
Tags: call centers, jobs paradox, simple software