Can You Hold, Please?

Welcome to the on-demand era. It’s become commonplace to vent our frustrations on gadgets that don’t perform exactly or as quickly as we want them to.

Will Ferrell once tweeted, “Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are.”

The same can be true at our place of employment. While speed may have improved to tolerable levels for most of our personal devices, many of our workplaces are playing constant catch-up with the latest and greatest tools and technology.

Have you ever been at a service counter or on a call with a service provider and experienced their irritation against their work computer? Maybe you’ve heard them murmur something like, “I’m sorry, our system is down again,” or, “I can’t do anything for you right now because our system is so slow.”

As a customer, did it breed confidence in your sense of being well taken care of? Did you have any empathy for that worker? Did you care about their computer problems? Did you secretly wish you had gone to the agent beside them who wasn’t whining in everyone’s ear?

As a worker, what does it feel like when you are trying to provide excellent service and your computer is not cooperating? Does the dead air while you’re waiting feel uncomfortable? Or do you put the customer on hold to discretely resolve the issue? Does your patience level with technology align with your company brand?

Now, I haven’t found any statistics but I wonder whether those of us who can still recall the wait-time of dial-up modems have any advantage when it comes to patience with technology. Being in my late 30s, I fit somewhere between the generation that entered the workforce before computers and the generation that entered after.

I can proudly say that I grew up playing in the backyard, and we had a phone attached to the wall. Our biggest frustration was when our mother failed to respond to our childish demands because she was gabbing away for hours on the phone with her friends.

I was in grade five when computers were introduced at school. I can still hear the crunching sound of those early printers with reams of perforated paper that you had to tear apart. We mastered command-prompt games like Oregon Trail and Police Quest, long before Microsoft Windows made everyday computing tasks easier for nontechy types.

I find my particular generation, which is now midstream in the active workforce, in a unique position of having been raised during the transition from corded to cord-free technology. From a professional standpoint, existing within this tipping point has proven to be quite a gift. I can relate to both perspectives of frustration when it comes to technology: the elders who struggle with feelings of inadequacy and the juniors who struggle to maintain momentum with their machines.

The reality is that we humans now depend on technology in almost every aspect of our daily lives, whether at work, at home, or just out with friends. So it is inevitable that we will have conflicts with our computers and devices when something goes awry, and we may legitimately exude a sense of superiority when technology fails us. The question is, how far will we allow our negative user experience spill over to the customer’s experience?