Tomi Ahonen launches into an inimitable rant today, condemning Sprint Nextel in the US for sacking 1,000 customers. The problem? It seems that the “Sprint 1000″, as they shall no doubt become known in the Blogosphere, are people who call their call centre more than 40 times a month. Read Tomi for the whole shebang.
But it also raises a very interesting point for all of us involved in technology - how are we meant to deal with stupid customers, or at least digitally challenged ones? (I’m not suggesting that all the Sprint 1000 were stupid, by the way - that’s just the angle I want to discuss).
As technology gets more complicated - and it’s going to get harder to use before it starts getting significantly easier - how much of a duty of care do we owe customers to help them make sense of it? Obviously someone who calls a call centre 40 times or more in a month will be unprofitable. So one possible response would be to fire them and I’m sure that Sprint won’t be the first or last to go down this route. Another would be to try to educate them (assuming they’re not calling to enquire on progress about legitimate service issues). But at what point does your duty of care run out and you just have to accept that you don’t want to do business with these people. Or, indeed, is it ever acceptable?
There was an article in New Scientist a few weeks ago (no link as it’s behind a subscription wall - so pretty old science, then) about prejudice towards the stupid. This wasn’t patronising, just pointing out that the average person has an IQ of 100. About 60 - 75% of us range from 85 - 115 IQ and function pretty well in an “intellectually challenging environment”, which is what the developed world has become.
But then there are about 5 - 15% who have IQ’s between 70 and 85 (below 70, people are regarded as having a cognitive disability). The 70 - 85′ers will have problems with language and arithmetic, meaning that they have as much of a chance of understanding a typical Product Manual, as I have understanding a wiring diagram for a space rocket.
Furthermore, these people represent between 2 and 6 million in the UK alone and about 15 to 45 million in the US, as an example. The wide range is caused by the fact that IQ measurement and results is far from being an exact science. But these are big proportions of the population as a whole. In capitalistic terms, this is a significant market. In political terms, it’s a huge number of voters to essentially disenfranchise from technology.
It’s actually even worse that this. Older people, who grew up without ready access to technology, have the potential to become disenfranchised too. While we hear stories of 95 year old grannies embracing technology and IMing and caming with their grandkids, there’s a significant proportion of older folks who can’t do any of these things and probably never will. Denying them access to technology will be tantamount to denying them full citizenship - how, in a few years, will they be able to operate a bank account, use a mobile phone or even, perhaps, drive a car?
Society has moved on from some of yesteryear’s basic prejudices and I certainly hope that we wouldn’t consider denying people access to equal rights as the rest of us on the grounds of colour or gender. So is it acceptable to deny them access on the basis of IQ or that they’re too old to learn new tricks?
And does a public company like Sprint Nextel, accountable primarily to its shareholders, have the right to draw the line somewhere (as they’ve done in this case) and say - “actually, you know - you’re too much hassle to do business with.”? And as they clearly do have that right, as a society, can we afford to let them?
But see the article over at the Consumerist, where a Sprint insider says that the customers in question were actually gaming the system for free Sprint service, rather than having legitimate problems with the company.
http://consumerist.com/consumer/exclusives/sprint-customers-terminated-for-complaining-too-much-were-scamming-sprint-for-free-service-277026.php
Anonymous
If you actually read my post, I haven’t criticized Sprint or passed any kind of judgment on this. I was just using the story as a jumping off point for a post about theoretically discriminating against people with low IQ and the elderly. In fact, I specifically said that they were within their rights and that the Sprint 1000 weren’t necessarily stupid either, to try to show I was making a general point about society and the direction we were going in.
Russell
You stated:
If developers and marketers would take the time to build complete and usable solutions, instead of maxmize time to market with feature creep and little attention to end-user experience, maybe then the calls would not be as frequent. I place the blame one Sprint for QoS and end-user experience for their models if it is that the reasons for these 1000 being dropped has to do with those two items specifically.
I do agree though that UI/UX should err on the side of “stupid” (to pull the term’s usage in your posting). Building solutions that have the feature needs to continue to stimular the more intellectual users, while not having an intimidating paradigm for not-so-intellectual ones would have a better effect on maxmizing the accessiblty and usable of mobile tech for all. If you will, take a little bit of what Apple/AT&T did with the iPhone/iTunes/celluar bit, add some attention to detail across the prodcut lines, and then market a solution that is simple, rather than just “ooh look at this feature.”
I’m with Antoine on this one: the real duty that technologists are shirking is the design of simpler mobile technology and computing products. I don’t think the failure to do this has to do with prejudice toward people with low IQs, I think it has to do with a blind spot in the minds of the product designers who can’t get past the idea that the way to make a product better is to add a new feature, implement a hot new technology, or deliver it in a tinier form factor without regard to the impact on ergonomics. It’s not just people with below-average intelligence that suffer from thoughtlessly complex technology products. Anyone who needs to focus their time and energy on the things they are trying to accomplish during their day rather than on their gadgets pays a price.
David and Antoine
I fully agree and have written lots before about usability. But this is a different issue from product design (though related). My point is really; when should a company give up on their customers because those customers don’t understand their products, when plenty of other brighter or more technology minded people do understand?
And yes, obviously we should always strive to make products more usable.
Russell
They shouldn’t. Unless somewhere in the product planning, acceptance, or marketing phase someone forgot whom the device would most likely be assumed by. If you want techies to get it, you price and market it that way. If you want novices to get it, you price and market it that way.
Looking back on what I typed earlier, I spoke of user interaction being more thought out on the developer, marketing, and carrier side. It would have been better if I would have looked at what you wrote thru the user experience side of things. Which includes what I wrote, but goes down to that overall company and product vision that any company inevitably wants users to take from them when their products are being used. Sprint seems to have missed out on this one if one just judges some of the accounts of those who have been cut off.
I see an opportunity here, for someone who designs phones and services for the Sprint 1000.
Since they seem to always have a lot of feedback about the service, and be very prompt about reporting errors, they would help improve the overall experience for the other consumers, who couldn’t care less if it worked or not. The latter would typically be saying “If it works, Great! But if it didn’t work, I ain’t using it.”
When I look at a phone, I look at it from the view of whether my mum would use it. That usually removes all the typical paradigms which come out of working in the mobile industry.
Werner
Russell I think you have hit on a real funbdamental issue here. It’s so easy to pontificate about the exciting new behaviours we are seeing which are undoubtedly shaping our future. But the realities of transforming the industry in this Digital Media Economy is much more complex. And the issues you raise are among the key ones. I have cross posted here (http://brandsdigitalmediaandme.blogspot.com/2007/07/weve-become-temporarily-obsessed-with.html) with some other references on this subject.
Great blog!