The customer CAN handle the truth

Posted on February 7th, 2010 in Customer Centric.

It is time for marketers and communicators to stop treating customers like little children and start treating them like intelligent adults.

“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology,” the good Google person told me. “This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

Why couldn’t they have just written:
“Over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and other older browsers.”

“Thank you for your inquiry,” the fye.com auto-generated email that was impossible to reply to stated. “To assist in providing you the quickest answer to your inquiry, please see the Help Section of fye.com.” Hello? Sorry, fye.com, but that’s not the quickest way by any means. It is, however, the cheapest way for you to deal with support. Why be so dishonest with your language?

I had to call my broadband company today. “Your call is important to us,” the voice said as I waited on hold. Is it indeed? If my call was important to you then you’d answer it. You wouldn’t put me on hold and you wouldn’t insult my intelligence by saying “Your call is important to us.”

Do organizations actually test their lies, deception, spin, and half-truths on customers? Does it really work? Or does it instead annoy and irritate customers?

I was staying at the Royal Lancaster in London and I wanted to sign up for broadband. I clicked on the link. “Welcome to the The Royal Lancaster,” Thank you for choosing us to serve as your “home away from home”” And it went on and on and on. “Whether for work or pleasure, we are pleased to introduce our industry leading in-room high-speed Internet services amenity … It’s Easy to Use … We hope you find this service exciting and valuable.” When I clicked “Continue” I was then told the price. £17 for one day. Yes, £17.

“We are delighted to inform you that the Guest Elevators are currently undergoing a complete refurbishment,” the sign outside the Hilton Edinburgh elevator told me. And me, I was absolutely delighted too, thrilled, and jumping for joy as I carried my heavy bags up the stairs.

I remember reading about a study of house selling in the book Freakonomics. Seemingly, in for-sale ads the following words were associated with houses of genuine quality: “granite, state-of-the-art, corian, maple, gourmet.” Poor quality houses, on the other hand, had these words associated with them: “fantastic, spacious, !, charming, great neighborhood.”

I saw an example of this one day when I visited a house for sale that was advertised as: “Fantastic and rare opportunity to acquire this beautiful 7 bedroom detached home. This property has got it all!” As the sales agent quietly said to me, “The only thing you could do with this house is knock it down and start again.”

Here’s a radical idea: Tell the customer the truth. They can handle it.

 

8 responses

  1. nanoamp says:

    Added on February 8th, 2010 at 9:59 am

    I think you’re harsh to google on this one. Their message to Google Apps users was a truthful and adult rationale for change. Most intelligent customers hate unexplained change in services, especially when they’re outside their control, or think there might be a detriment to them. Whilst your terser version is fine for me, my (character-building) experience of managing change in web services says that they’re right to account for their actions.

    Google’s failure here was that the message went through the bland machine before publication. They meant: “We’d rather spend time and money making shiny new things for you than keeping things working in obsolete browsers like IE6″ but it got turned into this by the marketing droids.

  2. Mick Dolan says:

    Added on February 8th, 2010 at 10:43 am

    Appetite for lies
    Good one Gerry, Jack Nicholson would be proud. Unfortunately me thinks the “great unwashed” don’t or wont stomach naked truth all the time. I like dressing on my salad, other wise it’s just a plain old salad. Toyota’s brand is built on selling “reliability” , despite the truth that their brakes may fail or accelorators may stick human’s believe it is human to error..or to err is human. Government’s must sell wars. Tony Blair believed there were weapons of mass destruction. He still believes the war was for the greater good despite the fact that there were no WMD’s.
    We must buy into NAMA, despite the fact that we may be suspicious and distrustful of the outcome, it is for the greater good of us all that it succeeed. Truth is visceral and sometimes unpalatable. I think it best to be “economical” with the truth. We can handle that, but please don’t lie to us. That’s the difference.

  3. Lynne Homeyer says:

    Added on February 8th, 2010 at 3:59 pm

    I don’t know why it’s such a struggle for intelligent, well-meaning marketing people to relax into telling the truth. Do they fall for the weasel-messages such as the ones in Gerry’s article? No. But they expect our customers to do so. David Ogilvy said it a billion years ago: “The customer is not a moron. The customer is your wife.” I do agree that explaining the reason we’re inconveniencing you, Mr. or Ms. Customer, is appropriate, but I would prefer nanoamp’s truthful message to the droid version.

    We think, so treat us as if we think, yes?
    Thanks, Gerry.

  4. Mike Simpson says:

    Added on February 8th, 2010 at 5:03 pm

    I used to get regular calls from my bank, saying “This is just a courtesy call to see if we can help you.” I told them in no uncertain terms that what would be courteous would be Not Phoning Me Up At Work. If I want to talk to them, I know where they are.

    But this isn’t really a web problem, it’s a customer service problem. The difference the web makes is that customers can discuss such poor customer service.

  5. Michael says:

    Added on February 9th, 2010 at 9:13 am

    I was having difficulty recently with my broadband - the router died. I rang the helpdesk to seek a replacement and while on hold, this happens every time, they play a meesage that tells you to go to http://www.eircom.ie/broadband. Well I wouldn’t be calling tech support if I had internet access. Not so much about telling the truth as not giving me annoying messages. Dummies!

  6. Chiara Bolognini says:

    Added on February 9th, 2010 at 4:42 pm

    You are highlighting the need of social networking through this article. I am sure you can understand why I am stressing the importance of first hand, shared and interactive information against the one way communication.
    On the other hand I agree with you that this should happen even on the earth. What can I say? We should let spread the social media revolution in the offline world to infect the entire communication system. Some companies are using social media tools as customer care systems…

  7. jenn_lee_ca says:

    Added on February 11th, 2010 at 12:39 am

    This is great! I still see many corporations struggle with using plain language. What many companies miss is that by delivering a “fluffed” up message, the company turns the message back to themselves. That is “we are delighted that we are renovating our elevators” can be read by people as “we are doing this much work, FOR YOU” and “we want you to notice how much we have to spend on YOU.” I think too many people are afraid of using plain language. I think it would be nice to say that marketers should use plain language. The word “truth” can have loaded connotations, and in defense of many marketers, they may view those messages as “truths” — they may be excited over the renovations…but they just have not made that leap over to thinking and empathizing with their customers. As for Michael’s dilemma, I don’t think the company has thought through on why people would phone the company for support — in that case, I always hit “0″ and try to get an operator. I like social media, but you also need access to the Internet to get that help as well. There is always a case for phone support, the company has to understand how many people phone in for support and the reason why. If people are phoning in for items that can be resolved online, then why? Is the content not communicating what it is supposed to? Is it the navigation? Is the demographic not comfortable with using the Internet? It always go back to understanding how your customers want to interact with the company.

  8. Mike Simpson says:

    Added on February 11th, 2010 at 9:58 am

    “We are delighted to inform you that the Guest Elevators are currently undergoing a complete refurbishment” is insane. As a customer I’m not going to be delighted about that because I don’t want to use the lifts* when they’re refurbished. I want to use them now. And they ain’t working.

    “We apologise for the inconvenience while our lifts are undergoing essential maintenance,” is surely what they meant to say. And then they should have clear directions to the staff lift. It’s not rocket science.

    In that respect, the online equivalent is ‘coming soon’ or ‘page under construction’. I don’t care what will be on your site in the future, I’m only interested in what is here now. And working.

    *Did a British hotel really use ‘elevators’? Dear God…

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