Where Have All The People Gone?
By
Shirley Duglin Kennedy
Those of you who are long-time
readers of Info Today know that I’ve been writing this column since dinosaurs
roamed the earth. Or at least since the
Internet was all shiny and new, largely uncommercial,
and absolutely awe-inspiring to those of us in the information profession who
envisioned the potential of cyberspace.
Alas, I’ve lately been feeling
particularly frustrated and cynical. I
guess I was pushed over the edge by an absolutely toxic telephone encounter
with BellSouth, which provides both my residential phone service and my DSL
access. (I’m a fairly new customer, and
I must say that this company amazes me.
There never seems to be anyone available to answer questions about my
bill when I call in the evenings – the line rings constantly busy until the
billing office is closed -- but I hear regularly from their telemarketers at
night, pushing additional products and services.)
OK. You probably know this drill. All of a sudden, your Internet connection
doesn’t work. After performing the
obvious checks – Are all the cables plugged in?
Are you getting dial tone on the regular phone line…or, for cable modem service,
is the cable TV working? – you call your ISP’s
customer service number. And practically
the first thing you hear is a recording urging you to go to the ISP’s website
where you can access “online help.”
Do you sense some sort of
disconnect here?
Of course, on many other
occasional, you’ve gone directly to company websites in order to ask a question
or research/resolve a problem. Heck, if
you can get to the Web easily, this is often a much better alternative than
wrangling with one of those agonizing telephone trees, where none of the seven
menu choices seem to fit your particular situation and, while you’re mulling
this over, you are routed to an endless hold queue, disconnected, or confronted
with a busy signal that forces you to hang up, call back, and start the entire
ordeal all over again.
Alas, so many corporate website
are user unfriendly in the extreme. Why
do some organizations persist in thinking we’ll be impressed/entertained by
elaborate Flash animations? Why do they
implement complex Java- or Javascript-based
navigation systems that result in browser error messages or crashes? Why do they have have such terrible site search functions – or no
search function whatsoever?
And why, oh why, do so many
entities urge you to visit their websites for customer service and then don’t
even bother to answer your question with anything other than an autoreply or an e-mail message full of irrelevant
boilerplate material? Or worse – ignore
your inquiry altogether, allowing it to be sucked into black hole of
cyberspace?
Where have all the people gone?
Apparently, they’ve been
replaced not only by Byzantine telephone trees, but also by impenetrable
websites and clueless e-mail auto responders.
Even if you do manage to get hold of a “live” customer service rep, the
odds are pretty good these days that the person is sitting in a call center in
India, the Philippines or some other developing country where options for the
educated, English-speaking segment of the population are limited, and so these
folks are happy to work for a lot less than a company would have to pay someone
in the good old U.S. of A.
So…do you think technology will
replace the library? Has it already done
so? Michael Schuyler, who writes the
“View from the Top Left Corner” column for Computers in Libraries, wrote last
April (http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/apr02/schuyler.htm) about Gary Locke,
The Washington State Library was
saved from the axe following an extensive lobbying campaign and the eventual
transfer of its function to the Secretary of State, Locke is not the only
elected official who has deemed a library to be superfluous…and look how many
corporate libraries have fallen victim to budget cuts. One technical organization that I personally
know about closed its information center, got rid of the three professional
librarians, and gave all of its engineers accounts on LexisNexis so they could search for their own
information. Never mind that few of
these technical employees had the time or the inclination to learn how to use LexisNexis.
Meanwhile, the company continues to struggle financially.
In my present job, I find myself
back behind a reference desk for the first time in many years, and it’s a nice
change from spending pretty much all of my time interfacing with
computers. A week or so ago, a pair of
students approached me with a question about eastern European business
practices. “We already tried Google,”
one of them explained, “but we didn’t really find anything useful.”
And a customer of our library’s
fee-based business information service
(http://mba.vanderbilt.edu/walker/bis/index.htm) e-mailed us with a request for
certain international economic statistics.
He’d “found some stuff on the Web,” he said, but wanted us to check
“authoritative sources” to make sure he was using accurate information.
Maybe there’s hope.
Maybe there should be librarians
in every customer service call center.
Maybe telephone trees and corporate websites should be designed by
librarians instead of techies.
Maybe these improvements should
be mandated by law.
***
Has your institution moved to Windows XP? You’ll want one or more of the relevant
O’Reilly & Associates books in your professional collection:
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Shirl
Kennedy is the electronic resources librarian at the Walker Management Library,
Owen Graduate School of Management,