Why can't organisations respond to queries and issues by focusing on the subject matter, rather than focusing on extracting unnecessary info from the person they're talking to?
Storified by Kate Griffin ·
Tue, Aug 06 2013 03:11:33
At the weekend, there was a bike-marking session at my local police station. What a brilliant idea! Bring your bike along during the two-hour session and get it marked so that it's easier to track down if stolen. My local police advertised it on their Twitter feed:
Sadly I didn't find out about it until the last minute and I was busy. I couldn't decide whether to rearrange things and go. To make that decision, I needed to know: was this a one-off or is this something they're planning to do again in the future?
The Thames Valley Police website yields no clues about future dates for bike-marking sessions. I thought about ringing them, but my husband reminded me: last time I phoned the police with a similar query, they demanded personal details from me, including my full address and phone number, before they could even try to answer my question. Then they said they'd ring me back and never did.
Last time my husband rang them it was the same story: taking endless details, lots of painful spelling-things-over-the-phone, then they couldn't answer his question (which was "Will you be closing Magdalen Bridge on May morning?").
In both cases, the info we wanted should have been available on their website in the first place. But it wasn't. Anyway, I was reluctant to ring them because it takes so much time and energy, so I tried tweeting them.
I didn't get an answer so I had to just make a decision; I decided not to go. They finally replied to my query (which was made at lunchtime on a Saturday) on the Monday morning:
Again, the obsession with taking my contact details. Despite the fact that I can't message them because they're not following me. But they're not actually answering my question. I wanted to know about future public bike-marking sessions, not least because I'm a member of the local Bike User Group and I wanted to share this info with other Witney cyclists who missed out last time. So I repeated my question:
24 hours later, I still haven't had an answer. This is info that should be on their website anyway. It's info they should be putting in a press release and sharing with local groups such as the Bike User Group and the mountain bike club. But they're not. Even when asked a direct question, they're still unable or unwilling to hand this info over. Why?
That same weekend, my husband was trying to fix some internet problems we're having. But he couldn't find the admin username and password to log in to the router. So he tweeted our (lovely) internet provider, The Phone Co-op:
It's not just me who's seeing a pattern here, right? My husband is seeking info that he believes should be available on the organisation's website already. The organisation isn't arguing about that, but it is requiring him to ring Tech Support (and no doubt give personal details) to get the answer. When he refuses that option, they want him to DM them with his "customer reference number". Again, they're requiring personal info from him before they'll answer a general question. And again, they haven't grasped that a person can't DM on Twitter you if you're not following them.
Anyway, they followed him and he DMed them. What do you think happened next? Do you think they finally answered his question by replying to his message with the info he'd been requesting for nearly 24 hours? Not on your nelly. Instead, they rang our home landline, despite the fact that he'd already said he was at work. They spoke to me, expecting me to know all about it. (Luckily, I did.) They gave me the router username and password, which were so generic I think it's obvious that they're the same for every customer.
I raised the same question with the guy on the phone: why can't you put this info on your website? My husband was asking for the info, yes, but he was also asking how to find out this info in future. And I don't think he was after an answer along the lines of "ring Tech Support". The guy on the phone didn't seem to really get my point, though I repeated it; we'd asked for the login, we'd got it, so what's the problem?
With all this fresh in my mind, I was catching up on Twitter and saw this:
This is someone who works for a large, somewhat bureaucratic organisation with a dedicated IT department. To recap: Cyber Mango
contacted the IT department about an issue with a printer. Just like
Thames Valley Police, they took details from her, including contact
details. Which is time-consuming and annoying enough to put a lot of people off.
Does all this unnecessary info-harvesting help to get the printers fixed more quickly, though?
