Hanging On The Telephone

Have you ever heard this before?

Record your message after the tone. To send a numeric page, press 5. When you are finished recording, hang up; or for delivery options, press pound. (Beep).

That’s the message appended to each T-Mobile subscriber’s voice mail greeting. Other carriers’ versions can be found at http://dwipal.blogspot.com/2006/04/voice-mail-messages.html.

However, I don’t use numeric paging. I wish I could turn this message off, but that isn’t a configurable option.  So if you leave two phone messages each day, waiting for this message takes up 14 hours over the course of a year. If you make $15 an hour, then that’s $210 of your time wasted (If you make more or less, then do your own math.)

Perhaps customers don’t recognize this because they rarely call their own voice mail. But why aren’t carriers aware they’re inconveniencing their customer’s inbound callers for the sake of a tiny audience that uses paging. This is a blind spot in their usability testing.

Satisfying the Few by Inconveniencing the Many

Dell prides itself on supporting all computers the company has ever sold, and that’s a noble goal. But it has a significant impact on the quality of online support. To find information on a specific model, you have to choose from a vast list spanning the complete 14 year history of the company. For desktops alone, support is offered for 18 different product lines, and as many as 86 different model numbers are offered for just a single product line (Dimension)!  Try it out for yourself.

By deferring to a minuscule customer population, they’re creating friction for customers trying to service themselves and costing the company money. There’s a real opportunity to improve their  online interface by only listing product lines currently in production by name, and then offering an “Other” option, and offer information to the legacy customers that way.

Bringing it back to cell phones, even when users don’t notice that they’ve been inconvenienced, the degradation of the customer experience impacts overall satisfaction. The first cellular phone company that recognizes this opportunity will earn my appreciation, and perhaps my next contract.