Customer Education
By \ March 28, 2006
This morning, the GE repairman came to my house to fix our refrigerator. The fridge’s internal light wasn’t shutting off because the door dropped about a quarter of an inch on its hinge, missing the light shut-off contact. It turns out, that little light cranks out as much heat as a toaster oven – by the time we figured out what was happening, everything in the fridge was more or less cooked.
Anyway, the repair person came exactly at 8:00AM. And he was gone at 8:03 AM. He said that the hinge screw just needed to be turned a couple of times. We asked him if we owed him money. He said, “No, I am going to put it down as customer education.”
I wish I have had the wherewithal to take a picture of this guy so that what I am about to say would make more sense. As the repairperson explained what he had done, he shifted his weight around nervously, finding his shoes more interesting to look at that us, and speaking as if he was in a rush. What I am getting at is this: “customer education” can’t possibly be “his” term. It is drenched with marketing finesse and acumen. Yet, here he was telling us that we were dummies in a way that didn’t feel bad. And he did so innately – the words rolled out as if they were his own.
How do marketing concepts geared to improve customer experience transcend ten billion layers of management down to where the rubber hits the road? What’s more, how do marketers help people internalize this message so well?
Once again, we find ourselves looking at and learning from a business entity that has been around forever. In our industry, our response to a similar situation is “user error” or “carbon based error.”
We have been very defensive as an industry from day one. Our field is new and every discovery and advancement rattles our understanding and process. We are in constant flux. We are perpetually defending designs and code that is outdated three heartbeats after it is published. With so much change, it is no wonder that users have such a poor and inconsistent experience on the internet.
There are measures that we can take as designers, strategists and technologist to ensure that our work is useful and timeless. However, when the inedible problem comes up, our industry could learn a lot from GE (and thousands of years of business etiquette): the customer is always right.