Last month Sprint launched a new and enhanced website that purported to be an improvement over the existing way that the company interacted with it's customers. Their IT magicians flipped the switch to dazzle us with their latest creation but instead ended up releasing the kracken. For the better part of an entire week, users trying to perform functions as basic as paying their bills, activating a new phone or contacting customer service were met the image of a jaunty yellow construction hat and a perfunctory apology for certain portions of the site being inaccessible.
Following current PR disaster control protocol, the company used social media tools to tweet and blog about the issue, reassuring their customers that they were trying to fix the problem and invoking the one excuse that we in the wider world should consider totally unacceptable: These are complex issues.
Message to any vendor in the tech arena: That's not our problem, it's yours.
It's frankly insulting for companies involved in anything from building websites, to designing software, to providing cable service, to tell us, the users of their products and services, that they're toiling so very hard to fix something. We should be patient because it's, you know, so damn intricate. After all, there are all these lines of code and all this wiring and you should consider yourselves fortunate that we're smart enough to deal with it while all you have to do is pay/buy/subscribe. So quit griping about things not performing as advertised, you just don't understand how clever we are to provide you with this technology in the first place.
IT practitioners are talented professionals, but there's a bit of a god complex at work in their grandiose self perceptions. They picture themselves as somewhere between Gene Kranz and Mr Miyagi. Too often though, when things go off the rails, they pronounce with cryptic sagacity that if only we understood how incredibly complicated it is to do what they do then we would accept their gifts from Mt. Olympus with nary a complaint. Mix this aloof defensiveness with evasive PR language and what you really wind up with on the other end are angry, alienated customers who simultaneously need and despise you.
All we the users know is that what you offered wasn't what we got. You sold us something that's not working. It doesn't matter to us why, nor should it. We pay for something, it had better do what you say it does. How you make that happen really isn't my concern.
When I pay $40 for box seats, I don't want to hear my slumping $15 million-a-year cleanup hitter telling me how hard it is to hit a breaking ball. Just swing the bat and shut up.
