Suckerfish on the Side of Your Whale

I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm too lazy to go back and check. Our company occasionally uses web page notices to alert customers to important changes or to confirm important information. It's a really efficient way to make sure that everyone gets the information. Some people feel that a web page is too obtrusive, but from an economic efficiency point of view, I think it's far less obtrusive than us having to possibly raise prices because we've had to hire three more people just to call or email all of our customers.

There's a notice that comes up that asks people to confirm that their address is correct. I wouldn't have thought we'd need that, but it turns out we have customers who have been at a new address for years, and we never find out. For most people, this notice is very simple. They look at the address, update it if necessary, confirm that things are correct, and it's done.

This is apparently too hard for a lot of people, because around a third of my calls for the last few days have been people calling about that page. A few are genuine issues, such as their Internet browser having weird security settings turned on that prevents the page from loading correctly. However, the majority of the calls go something like this:

Caller: "I saw your notice, but my account doesn't renew for five months. Why do I have to renew now?"
Me: "The notice doesn't say anything about renewing your account. It asks you to make sure your address is correct."
Caller: "It was!"
Me: "Excellent. That's all it was asking about."
Caller: "Oh. So I didn't renew my account?"

Now, there are a couple of things about this kind of call that strike me as bizarre. For one thing, the customer didn't actually read it. This is another one of those "you could save yourself time and effort by looking at the thing directly in front of you" situations. There are very clear, simple instructions on the page, things like "Please make sure that your address appears correctly" and "Please click OK when you're finished". I don't understand why people would rather skip the 10 seconds of reading in favor of calling us, potentially waiting on hold, and spending more than 10 seconds while an agent explains what the notice says and what you need to do about it.

Another is the sheer number of people who think it's about billing (due to not reading it) and go ahead and complete the page anyway, then call to ask if they've done something with their billing. We offer dialup service. A lot of our customers use it because they don't want to or can't afford to pay more for high speed. I find it incredible that some are so cavalier about their finances that they blithely proceed through something that they aren't reading but vaguely think might be committing them to a financial contract.

And although this is a slightly different situation, a similar trend can be observed. A call earlier today:

Caller: "Hi, I'm trying to reactivate my account. I see the instructions on my screen. I haven't finished them. Why can't I use the Internet?"
Me: "Uh, well, those instructions are the steps to reactivate. You need to finish reactivating before your account with us is active again."

I mean, seriously? You just prefaced your question with the answer. Do you not understand that if you haven't finished your end of the steps, then you're not finished? Or are you just calling to be an ass?

And finally, on an unrelated note, a call I received recently: "Hi, do you have AOL's number?" "Um, no, I don't." "OK, thanks!"