Marketing messages, legal verbiage and website references over the phone are Evil
Posted by: eolvera, in Usability, Dialog Design(Adaptation from Gerry McGovern’s New Thinking column)
Marketing and legal messages, as well as reference to “visit our website” are the curse of the Phone. Those intrusive messages reflect a company way of thinking that’s centered around what the company wants to tell a caller, and not on why the caller is picking up the phone in the first place. On the phone, we need simplicity.
Every time I pick up a phone and get the traditional “Your call may be recorded for quality purposes”, “Your call is important to us” or even “You can visit our website at …”, I can’t help but feel bad for those VUI designers that *I’m sure* did everything they could to avoid cluttering their designs with messages like these.
I understand the intention of those messages but this is the phone. I really don’t care much about a company’s quality initiative or marketing efforts to drive more traffic to the web: “I’m in a hurry and I want to complete a task.”
The user experience is not really going to change if you tell them how important they are, even if the voice comes from a perfect Persona. But if you solve their problem fast and efficiently - either through an automated system or a live agent - then that tacit message becomes very clear to them.
Otherwise, your company and your service scream “We don’t care about your time. We took this legal disclaimer/corporate mandate/marketing initiative, recorded it and put it on our phone because we wanted it.”
What’s even worse, if someone calls you it means that you have already got their attention. Your website, brochure, statement, or whatever other form of communication or marketing you used, has worked. The worst thing you can do now is keep using tactics for getting the attention of someone whose attention you already have. For example, if I go to a website and cannot complete a task, I look for their contact information and call them directly. Therefore what experience do you think that company delivers when the first message I hear advertises the website which failed me in the first place.
We need to think about the purpose of the messages we’re creating. What is its job? What is it meant to achieve? What do our callers need to do and how will this content help them do it? Too many companies create messages without asking themselves these questions.
Banning the use of disclaimers, legal and marketing messages (or at the very list, making them optional for customers to listen to - similar to how software and websites work which give you the option to read it) will dramatically improve the ability of your callers to complete tasks quickly and simply.