It seems the current issue of BusinessWeek is focusing on Customer Service Champs in 2008 and “Consumer Vigilantes“.
Therefore it isn’t surprising to seem them cover a little bit of the history of the GetHuman movement and its evolution from a simple IVR cheatsheet into a full movement with the goal of “convincing enterprises that providing high quality customer service and having satisfied customers costs much less than providing low quality customer service and having unsatisfied customers.”
Even though the tone of the article seems to be a little gloomy and critical about how “page views on the site have dwindled”, I would argue that page views and sign-ups for an audio icon are not necessarily a reflection of the level of interest or impact GetHuman and the standards they’ve proposed have had so far.
I think that even though the approach to promote the standards might not have been the best one, it definitively has had an impact on how designers think about customer interactions, how companies are much more aware of the impact of caller experience in automated systems, and has paved the way to get the worlds of consumers, businesses and designers talk the same language and agree on long-term goals.
The part where I think the standards got a little disconnected from the real world had to do with the fact that in other technologies, standards can work in a vacuum as long as implementers or partners agree on them. In our case, I think that the fact that they are so closely related to customer experience and caller satisfaction warrants a much closer analysis of those standards in the context of those same caller’s goals. For example, standard #6 reads: “Callers should not be forced to listen to long/verbose prompts.”, but without any context, it would be akin to promoting a web standard similar to “Users should not be forced to read long/verbose sections of text.”… well, what happens if I’m reviewing a prospectus or accessing a white paper? Would offering that service disqualify me from being standard-compliant?
Furthermore, I think the other reason it cannot survive as an independent standard is because users very seldom limit their interactions to a single interaction channel (telephone in this case) but attempt to use whatever channel is more convenient based on their situation, location and past history with the company (internet, phone, branch, email, fax, chat, etc.). Therefore standards should consider those other channels as well so that the original goal of providing high quality service and having satisfied users can truly be accomplished in the context of the entire customer service experience.