Our kitchen oven has an analog digital clock that looks like it’s from the 50’s. It’s digital because it uses digits that advance, but it’s analog because they are printed on big wheels (or something) that advance mechanically. I tried to set it, which involved pushing in the stick that one turns to set the timer, and trying to rotate the stick despite it having no knob. Each turn advances the time 3-10 minutes, but pushing the stick in does not DE-activate the timer-setting function, so every time you wind it past “0” on the timer it buzzes at you.
As ancient as it feels, it benchmarks the pace of technology: the oven was installed no earlier than 1990.
This got me wondering when we started expecting consumer electronics to be very user friendly and, you know, electronic. It’s around then then VCR’s became important, and “programming a VCR” became synonymous with “dealing with poorly-designed interfaces.”
Was it Steve Jobs and the iPod that created an expectation that consumer electronics would be so easy to use our children would figure it out, and that you shouldn’t even NEED a paper manual?
This got me thinking about one of Jobs’s interface revolutions: visual voicemail. It’s almost hard to believe it took the iPhone before anyone figured out how to make voicemail work without navigating those damned trees and listening to all those options. How stone age phone trees seem to be by contrast.
So why hasn’t phone-based customer service caught up? It’s got to be one of everyone’s pet peeves to have to deal with phone trees that never seem to have the right options, request that you “listen to all options before selecting,” wait to hear which number to push for espa�ol… only to find out at the end of the tree that customer service isn’t even open.
So here’s an idea: a smartphone app that does the phone tree for you visually. Let’s say United Airlines has its customer service app. You can click through the phone tree, and it already knows your frequent flier number, your itineraries, your flight history, and all the rest, so no need to enter all of that again. You could even bookmark the parts of the tree you use often.
Now, I know this is basically what lots of company’s websites do already, but here’s the important part:
When you get to the part where you need a human, you don’t click the number and then go through customer service AGAIN… you just push a button and the phone connects you DIRECTLY to an agent (or a hold queue) who ALREADY knows all your info and who you want to talk to (or, even better, the app could have the agent call you when they’re free — it’s not a callBACK because you haven’t called in yet).
Now, the mechanics might be tricky — maybe you need a PIN to give the agent to give them access to your preloaded responses and send you to the right branch of customer service, or, even better, the system could use caller-ID to know it’s you and send you straight there. Or maybe there are a lot of direct-dial numbers that the app could choose from to get you where you need to go, or maybe it could be Skype-like and use VOIP to send you directly to your agent without even using the old phone system.
And yes, I know a lot of sites offer to connect you to chat with an agent, but actually talking to them is so much faster and more efficient.
At any rate, customer service phone trees continue to be a major obstacle between customers and the agents that can help them. Since almost everyone is using a smartphone to call in anyway, why are we still navigating voice-navigated phone trees, like the old voicemail systems?
It seems to me that the first phone-tree solutions company that implements this for its corporate customers will transform the industry overnight, and any company that doesn’t have it will seem hopelessly and pointlessly customer-unfriendly.
The title of this post is not rhetorical: am I missing a reason this would be hard?
Ha! I had never heard of that. I guess it’s good to hear that the startup boom did create some attempts to solve this problem.
If I might hazard a guess as to why Fonolo failed, it’s because they attempted to be a middleman that knew every company’s phone tree and navigated it for you. Without buy-in from the companies involved, it relies on people finding and using their service and then… profit? There’s no model for expansion beyond “cool website”, and some companies might not appreciate “bots” navigating their systems and saying “hold while we connect you to your customer” to their phone agents.
Their move over to a phone queue management service might actually be a step in the right direction — if their corporate customers want to buy their “solutions” then customers will have to hear about it, have incentives to use it (“I see you’re on an iPhone… download our App and avoid our obnoxious phone trees!), love it, and start expecting it everywhere.
Totally agree, Jason. A company called Fonolo was claiming to do just this a few years ago (http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/19/fonolo-joins-the-growing-arsenal-against-phone-tree-hell) but they seem to have retreated to just doing phone queuing now. Not sure why they seem to be focusing on a less ambitious goal now.