The dead parrots of customer service
I like Peter Leppik's Top Ten Most Annoying Recorded Messages, getting behind the cliched phrases that so many customer service systems seem to parrot from one another.
My favourites:
6. "In order to help us serve you better...."
This message is invariable followed by asking me to jump over some obnoxious customer-hostile hurdle.
and
3. "Your call is very important to us."
A statement which is immediately proven false.
Peter is at Vocalabs, a company that surveys and evaluates the user experience of call centers and IVR speech recognition systems. Their blog has many practical insights into the shortcomings of customer service UIs and the pretensions behind them.
