What if you were a mobile phone company and you could figure out a way to keep millions of customers on the line for an extra 15 seconds every time they left a voicemail message? You'd make millions.
In the US, when you call someone's mobile and it rolls over to voicemail, you hear their outgoing message and then an extra message from the carrier telling you, in case you've never done it before, how to talk after the beep. That's the extra 15 seconds.
David Pogue, the Personal Technology correspondent for the New York Times, does the numbers:
These little 15-second waits add up–bigtime. If Verizon’s 70 million
customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in
about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three
hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same
message over and over again every year.
Pogue is starting a campaign to get the carriers to remove this extra message, or at least make it optional. Looks like it's getting tons of response.
So two interesting notes for experience researchers. First, the way he's running the campaign is snarky, opinionated, probably effective, and (get this!) POLITE. He warned the companies what he's doing, asked them where the comments should go so it doesn't disrupt their business. Polite and effective -- what a great way to protest.
Second, what do we researchers do when we see a client engaging in these tactics. It is our duty to represent the views of the customer and the business. Sure, we need to support the business goals of our clients, but we do them no favours when we see that their tactics are building up consumer resentment that could boomerang on them.
They'll make their own decisions to balance profit and consumer upset, but they can't do that unless they know what's on the customers' minds. That's our job. To tell them what's on their customers' minds.
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