A little tale about Usability
2012
About Fabrizio Di CarloI am student of Engineering, thinker, wannabe startupper and geek. Founder of Progettiamo.eu, Co-Founder of Startuppi and Co-Founder of 14th Hall.
Since yesterday I had no water at home, we realized this only in the evening cause an unexpected dinner in my rustic. Looking for information on the site of the water company there was nothing, nothing even on the Internet, I sent an email without results. This morning after checking the mail around 10:30 am I call the call center and after waiting 5 minutes, because of other calls, the operator tells me that there is a sudden failure. Realizing the lack of warnings, normally found in planned interventions, then I asked why there was no communication on the company website, and the operator: “Oh, because we preferred to focus on failure rather than make a statement on the internet”.
Now, apart from that I can’t imagine the call center operators to fix their water pipes and sleeves but:
If only 50% of all callers, has a computer and know how to use it (ie, excluding older people or the famous housewife of Voghera) to understand what had happened, the wait would be decreased to 2.5 min and also operators would have had half of work, just spend 5 minutes writing a message.
Here this is the Usability, benefits both for the company and for the users.