My monitor has a resolution of 1280×800. Most websites nowadays are designed with a minimum resolution of 1024×768 in mind. I believe this is rather an aggressive resolution requirement. Even though my monitor’s resolution is greater than this requirement, I have trouble viewing many web pages. This is because I have a tablet PC, and it can be switched to portrait mode. Even though portrait mode feels like it should be better for web browsing (indeed, it is quite excellent at reading PDFs), it turns out that web pages always leave nasty horizontal scrollbars.
While I don’t know anyone with a resolution on their monitor of less than 1024×768, I know quite a few people with a resolution of 1024×768 exactly. Newer devices like the Eee PC, the iPhone, or the Nokia n800 or even my tablet, have resolution widths of 800, or perhaps even slightly less. These devices are built to read web pages proper instead of some cut down web. In addition, the devices have a substantial resolution.
Having horizontal scrollbars is unacceptable in today’s environment. Even CSS has become fairly modern, so there should be no excuse to have a website that is not flexible enough to work in all environments, especially given the variety of devices which are now being used to view these pages.
On Seth’s Blog he makes the claim that making customers go through a bunch of phone menus is bad for business. I understand this, and agree, but I disagree with a broader implication I think he’s making: That contact centers as technology solutions do not help when it comes to solving customer problems.
I don’t believe this is true. Firstly, they help simple access to their data without the internet. Even though the internet is more prevalent than ever, sometimes all you have is a phone and a desire to find out how much money you have, or have spent, or… something.
Secondly, when someone answers the phone, you need to ensure that the person has enough knowledge, or the correct knowledge, to solve the problem the customer is having. There’s also dealing with the financial pressure of measuring and controlling the flow of calls to ensure that agents aren’t sitting in a call center twiddling their thumbs.
Thirdly, even if the problem is easy to solve and there’s an agent available and you end up talking to them, there’s the added problem of putting up with the agent as they fiddle through their system. Recently, I’ve had to wait for many minutes whilst agents had to fill in various details, and were in turn waiting for their system to load data (likely web pages) from the server, or otherwise had to fill in unnecessary forms for common activities.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe industry best practices for call centers can be much improved, and public hatred of phone systems is well justified. However, tacitly hating them without reserve is not helpful.
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