Peter makes a similar point I was making to someone today: People HATE work. Peter refers to misguided marketing campaigns, whereas I was referring to the popular Internet strategy that says you should create self-service website to let people do the customer service themselves. What crap, the only reason people like this is because they’d rather get the job done themselves quickly then deal with poorly run customer service systems.
This genius suffers from incorrect customer service information, a representative who couldn’t take a message and follow up, and a wait of hours. He concludes, “In an imperfect world of customer service, most customers prefer to cut to the chase and help themselves.” While that’s true, what I think people REALLY prefer is customer service that works. The web shouldn’t be a crutch you pick up when you’ve given up on an internal process.