This reminds me of Vodafone‘s customer service last week when despite being apoplectic with ill-satisfaction (I won’t bore you with the dreary details) and explaining why I was upset on a number of levels, I was told in a tired monotone “we’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty in your case”.
Everyone I’ve told that story to since has laughed. It’s almost good enough to become a replacement for the “computer says no” catchline in Little Britain.
Windows Vista‘s designers – like the designers and stewards of Vodafone’s customer service – really, honestly, want to communicate well, but a cog in the logic mill has gone awry and instead a weird parallel, twisted call centre script becomes the main mode of conversation. A nasty ghost in the machine that “customer experience” has been reduced to.
Like all things, of course, it comes down to two things: keeping things at a human level, and good design.
At least the Windows error message has brought a lot of joy to the world in its own little way…
Via Gizmodo via Marc Andreessen.
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