"Sorry" on steroids

As a recovering Technical Writer, one of my top peeves--apart from the confusion of "its" and "it's"--is when instructions are just plain wrong.

My husband and I are filling out a big, nasty application, with all the hoop jumping you'd expect of anything that involves gate-keepers. But we're trying to be diligent so as not to throw off the timing--including not only reading the instructions on the printed portion of the application, but also the advisory "callout" info. that's embedded into the PDF document itself. So all the supporting info.'s been scraped together and everything bundled off for its once-over before it's officially submitted. No dice--it's batted back to me, directly contradicting the instructions in one of the call-outs.

That and the fact that the person "quality-checking" it referred by my husband by his middle name probably made my tone a trifle frosty when I suggested that perhaps they should change the call-out's wording to prevent future nuisance/delay. Surprisingly, I not only received an apology for the naming mix-up, but also a thank-you for pointing out the error in the instructions and the note that it will be corrected "immediately."

When's the last time you heard a front-line employee--i.e. someone who deals directly with the public all day--say something of that nature? A rather pathetic--if telling--commentary on the standard of "customer service," when a middle-class, middle-of-the-road person like me is actually blown back a little by a near-immediate fix to a problem.

Too many organizations, IMO, are afraid of their customers. Why? People have too many buttons, and they vary from person to person. And, worse, those buttons don't always do what their labels--if there's any label at all--says that they do. Worst of all, Marketing and Sales just want to know which ones make the wallet pop out and open. They just want to keep their lives simple by homing in on button-labels like "American Flag," "Kittens," "Christmas," "The Jones Don't Have This (Yet)," and "Does This Button Make Me Look Fat?" And they'll hammer 'em 'til they don't work anymore.

But beyond that, what the other buttons do when unintentionally pushed by the product or service...well, that's Someone Else's problem. And that Someone Else probably works for a minimal salary with minimal training (because they'll just leave for something even slightly less sucky at the drop of a hat anyway, don't you know?) who is "empowered" merely to pop out apologies like a Pez dispenser pops out Kool-Aid-flavored chalk.

All of which carries a staggering opportunity cost. From the management side of things, I can't imagine any single better way of making sense of your customers' buttons than spending time doing customer service or tech. support. A few days' worth of time, even at management salaries, has to be less expensive than paying consultants to compile the latest Twitter or Google Ad Sense trends. Or for that matter, less expensive than losing customers over problems that no one was "empowered" enough to fix before they became a PR nightmare.