10 Commandments for Gadget Mfrs
Read this in the NY Times this morning and thought it was spot-on (although not entirely original), #1 and #9 in particular.
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November 2, 2005
David Pogue
10 Ways to Please Us, the Customers
Dear Electronics Makers,
You must be getting pretty excited about the holiday season. No wonder. That's when we, your customers, hand you a huge chunk of your annual income - about $17 billion of our cash.
But what will you give us in return? Yes, of course, the finest gadgets technically possible for the amount we're willing to pay. But what else will you give us? Do you really want to earn our love and loyalty? Do you want us to be back next year?
If so, you should worship at the altar of good design and make customer satisfaction your religion. These should be your commandments.
I. Thou shalt not entomb thy product in indestructible plastic. Sure, we understand the temptation: you want your packaging to be sturdy yet see-through, so shoppers can see exactly what they're buying. Trouble is, you're caring only about whether people take your product home; you apparently don't care about what happens after that. You don't seem to mind that getting those hard plastic packages open is a dangerous ritual involving scissors, steak knives, band saws and, eventually, blow torches.
There are ways to have it all. Technology has marched on. You could design the front of your package with the rigid, clear plastic, but seal the back with easy-to-open cardboard. Or you could perforate the seams of your "clamshell" for easy separation without power tools. All it takes is a little imagination and, say, 0.015 cents per unit.
II. Thou shalt hire native English speakers to translate thine instruction manual. "When the camera focus is not so possible, hold the shutter button vaguely until the beeping tone is heard." Is that really how your company wants to address customers?
Talk about New Math. You'll spend millions of dollars developing some breakthrough gizmo, but won't spring for somebody to rewrite your manual in proper English? I know some high schoolers who'd do the job for $50 and 10 free ring tones.
III. Thou shalt not hype irrelevant specs. The digital camera industry wants us to believe that a camera's quality is somehow related to its number of megapixels. A seven-megapixel camera must be better than a four-megapixel one, right?
It's the same with computers, where millions of people still believe that the higher a computer's megahertz, the faster it runs. (To its credit, Intel has recently started playing down that simplified statistic.)
In cameras, the quality of your photos depends far more on things like lens quality, processor speed and image software; in computers, memory, hard drives and internal signal pathways are key determinants of speed. When you try to make us believe that a single statistic is all important, you're being deceptive, and that's not nice.
IV. Thou shalt not charge tech-support fees for thine own mistakes. We're used to getting 90 days of free technical-support calls, and being charged after that. We don't like it, but we're used to it.
But even after that period, you should still be liberal in saying, "We won't charge you." There are situations that merit free calls: when your product isn't working right; when the manual is unclear; or when the product is working right but the design is so poor we can't even tell.
V. Thou shalt not participate in rebate rip-offs. We admit it: we, the people, are cheapskates. You know and we know that we ruthlessly compare prices. We'll buy the cheaper gizmo almost every time.
But what do you do? You exploit our love of saving money by offering your delicious electronics for crazy-low prices - "after rebate."
So we buy your thing, cut out the barcode, fill out the form and staple the original store receipt. We handwrite the rebate center's address on the envelope, mail it away and wait.
And a few weeks later, you know what we get? A stress headache.
We've already sent away our only copy of the documentation and you didn't provide a phone number, so we're just stuck. You've got our money and you know there's nothing we can do about it.
But in this particular religion, there's a special circle of hell reserved for rebate cheats.
VI. Thou shalt not hide from thy customers. If you've designed your product properly and provided a decent manual in English, you ought to have nothing to hide; there should be very little reason to worry that we, the masses, will jam your phone lines asking for help.
Yes, of course, it's a lot cheaper to funnel people to your Web site for answers. But let's face it: your Web site is designed to handle only the most basic and obvious questions. It doesn't handle the more mystifying - and more common - real-world questions, and it certainly doesn't advertise or even acknowledge the bugs and glitches in your product.
True believers in customer service, then, do not conceal corporate phone numbers. Those numbers should appear on your Web site, head held high, and even - gasp - in the user manual. On Page 1.
VII. Thou shalt remember the customer's phone number. This means you, computer and cellphone companies. We call for help; we're asked to type in our 10-digit phone numbers or 20-digit customer numbers; then when an agent picks up, we're asked for that number again.
What - did you think we actually moved and changed our identities since placing the call?
If they can write software that sends a man to the moon, they can surely write call-center software that passes on to the agent the information we've already typed in.
VIII. Thou shalt not prevent "zeroing out" of thy phone-mail maze. When we do finally get you on the phone, we can tolerate a voice-mail system that routes our calls. But when we get frustrated or lost in the labyrinth - "Press 2 for sales, press 3 for service. ..." - we should be allowed to press the zero key to escape and talk to a live human being.
If you have designed a phone system to ignore desperate zero presses, then you're showing your fear. And we, the customers who pay for your whole operation, may wonder why you're trying to hide from us.
IX. Thou shalt not hog the power strip. If a power cord absolutely must incorporate one of those big black transformer bricks, how about putting it in the middle of the cord? When the transformer brick is at the prong end, it hogs three slots on our power strips or both outlets on the wall, and that's just greedy.
X. Thou shalt not plan obsolescence. In six to eight months, the digital cameras, cellphones and computers we buy will be discontinued, replaced by something better and cheaper. Sure, that's the march of progress. But every six months? Is that pace really necessary?
To be fair, dear electronics makers, your customers aren't perfect, either. We can be rude to you on the phone, even when the problem we're having is a result of our own cluelessness. We test drive your products and ask questions in retail stores, and then order online just to save a few bucks.
We clamor for more and more features, then complain that the result is more complicated to use.
But that's part of the game that you, our beloved gadget makers, have chosen to play. We may be the bane of your existence, but we're also the reason for it; you're stuck with us. We've got our credit cards ready - now show us some love.
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very good.
Linear Mode
