Pressing 0 over and over

To give up, press 2 now.

You’re deep into a push-button conversation with an “automated telephone response system.”

You had hoped to reach someone at a phone company, airline, library, bank. Instead, welcome to Crazytown. The Mad Hatter is in charge, and he has plenty of your time.

Surely everyone with a phone has a visceral interest in this topic. Luckily, we’ve scouted the terrain for you — SL at its post — and we’ve learned a thing or two about the language of automated response. We’ll investigate this strange tongue from time to time.

First, a low-tech tip

If you’ve ever just given up and punched O twenty times — fifty times — ONE MILLION TIMES — it turns out you’re onto something.

That’s right. You thought you’d been defeated, but the fact is that many advanced automated systems can recognize anger. More accurately, they recognize a long string of zeroes in quick succession, and they flag this pattern as anger — because someone, somewhere has correctly identified it as a reliable indicator of customer rage.

Many customer service departments know about this finding, but they don’t advertise it. Instead, they say Please pay attention because our menu has changed. And SL makes no guarantees — on any given system, you can press a thousand zeroes to no effect. A million.

But the technology is in place, and some systems move you faster if you convey your disenchantment in zeroes.

Some people might say it’s “the only language they understand,” while others might call that cynical. SL stands above.

Still, we are empiricists, and we must report that on occasion we have spoken this language and been fully understood.

Now what we REALLY need is a new button: Cancel my service, refund my money, and don’t make a peep.

Shameless in Seattle

It’s hard to believe that Netscape Navigator once dominated the browser wars. At one point its market share reached 70 percent and more.

There was a brutal struggle — and now IE’s share is 78 percent, NN’s less than a point.

In the epic battle, Microsoft’s tech writers and editors made a contribution that should not be forgotten:

Avoid the term navigate to refer to moving from site to
site . . . on the Internet. Instead use explore.
— Microsoft Manual of Style

 

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STRONG OR WEAK? Promoting a brand as a reference standard

The SL verdict: Strong if they get away with it. (Now it looks like they have: see So Long, Netscape.) The Microsoft Marketing Guide Manual of Style may be ordered from the Ministry of Truth, Redmond, WA.

Slap the pigeons

“Work your pigeons” is an old saw in sales — a cynical way of saying “Go back to your best customers.” Actually, if you treat your customers intelligently, they’ll welcome your return. Can we learn from Apple?

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Who bought the first iPhones?

Why, the loyal core of the Apple, naturally. The crazy-in-love, camp-at-the-store foamers who built the company — perhaps you know some.

That population deserves study, but not today. Instead let us examine Mr. Jobs’s own opinion of his loyalists, his Branded Best. First he touched them hard for the iPhone — $400 per each — and then he slashed prices a few weeks later.

At first they thought it was just bad luck, like the weather. (Wusht I’d planted later.) But some began to suspect a Jobs job.  (Come on, Apple — tell us the trigger for the cut. How many had to pop four before you announced the fire sale?)

Marketers have played high-low for centuries, or tried to. How maddening it is: If you lower your price, you’ll give up the premiums some buyers are willing to pay. That’s where we got coupons and bargain basements, clearance sales and automotive trim lines.

Many vendors go low routinely — “Three months of Cable for $3!” — but they leave out those who have already forked over their money. All Apple did was take high-low to a new and more transparent level.

Work your pigeons, then slap ‘em. Most will come wobbling back.

 

 

(Never suspect Strong Language of anti-Apple bias. We’ve wrestled Satan Microsoft for 33 years. Nuff said.)