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1. First, make a highly complicated and technical product.
2. Then make it widely available to the general public.
3. Let Joe Schmoe, your average guy, purchase it and take it home and use it for a while.
4. Eventually, the product will not work as expected. This may be because Joe is totally clueless and is hoplessly lost or it may be after Joe has exhausted every possibility his otherwise intelligent and knowledgeable brain can come up with and is now hopelessly lost.
5. Give Joe a phone number to call for help,
6. Send that phone number to another country where our Tech Support will answer the phone without being able to speak English and can only recite answers step by step according to a pre-written form based on keywords he singles out of the original question (much like the troubleshooting guide on the company website). These questions could be phrased intelligently by a knowledgeable person or could be complete jibberish by a total moron who happens to have enough money to buy our product, making it less likely that Tech Support will be able to correctly identify the problem in the first place.
7. This way, when Joe, who is already frustrated because his product is not working, tries to get help, he will be unable to understand even the most simple instructions because the highly complicated and technical-sounding terms are difficult enough to understand when spoken with a Midwestern accent in the language that invented the words, and will be impossible to understand when spoken with a thick foreign accent even when Joe is somewhat competent with aforementioned complicated and technical product but especially when Joe is a moron.
8. Make this experience so frustrating and painful that eventually Joe hangs up on our Tech Support personnel. This will keep our call center product solution phone call times to a minimum, allowing us to connect to a maximum number of customers in a minimum amount of time, thereby being the most efficient method of support for our customers.
Yeah, this sounds like a BRILLIANT strategy!
2. Then make it widely available to the general public.
3. Let Joe Schmoe, your average guy, purchase it and take it home and use it for a while.
4. Eventually, the product will not work as expected. This may be because Joe is totally clueless and is hoplessly lost or it may be after Joe has exhausted every possibility his otherwise intelligent and knowledgeable brain can come up with and is now hopelessly lost.
5. Give Joe a phone number to call for help,
6. Send that phone number to another country where our Tech Support will answer the phone without being able to speak English and can only recite answers step by step according to a pre-written form based on keywords he singles out of the original question (much like the troubleshooting guide on the company website). These questions could be phrased intelligently by a knowledgeable person or could be complete jibberish by a total moron who happens to have enough money to buy our product, making it less likely that Tech Support will be able to correctly identify the problem in the first place.
7. This way, when Joe, who is already frustrated because his product is not working, tries to get help, he will be unable to understand even the most simple instructions because the highly complicated and technical-sounding terms are difficult enough to understand when spoken with a Midwestern accent in the language that invented the words, and will be impossible to understand when spoken with a thick foreign accent even when Joe is somewhat competent with aforementioned complicated and technical product but especially when Joe is a moron.
8. Make this experience so frustrating and painful that eventually Joe hangs up on our Tech Support personnel. This will keep our call center product solution phone call times to a minimum, allowing us to connect to a maximum number of customers in a minimum amount of time, thereby being the most efficient method of support for our customers.
Yeah, this sounds like a BRILLIANT strategy!
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Date: 2/24/08 08:23 pm (UTC)From:I really wish technical products in general were a lot more open and transparent than most of them are. With most of the stuff I use (because I tend to select technical products that are more open) I get far better and more comprehensive support from the user community than I would from any organization dedicated to producing and supporting the product.
I think that if I'm in the position to make these sorts of decisions at a hardware vendor that I'm going to push for as much openness as possible. I'm going to push for forums for discussion and selecting our paid support people by picking the most helpful users from those forums and giving them money to stay there or spend more time on it.
It's the way to make support scale.