Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of conversations with the folks across at Adobe about what they are up to in the customer experience space.
On the back of that I’m in the middle of organising another interview for the blog with a member of the Adobe team to get their perspective and insight on the whole customer experience space, trends etc.
The person we are trying to set up a time to have a chat with is Rob Pinkerton, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Customer Experience Management. You can check out his bio here. All very impressive.
However, what really interested me was the post he recently wrote on Adobe’s blog called: In the Future, People Rule the World.
In it he talks about a website called GetHuman.com. I’d never heard of this site but, apparently, it started out as a ‘cheat-sheet’ of ways to make direct contact with a real person at a company that you wanted to contact thus allowing you to circumvent all of those (sometimes frustrating) web forms, automated voice systems (press 1 for X or 2 for Y etc) etc.
However, back to Rob’s post.
I really liked it because it comes from someone that works for a technology company but recognises that more self-service technology is not necessarily the solution but that technology that aids the human experience is what the consumer is demanding and companies that don’t get that or start to get that quick will lose out.
This I found really interesting and decided to go off and investigate GetHuman.com a bit more.
Here’s what I found:
It’s popular:
- According to Alexa.com, Gethuman.com’s three-month global Alexa traffic rank is 59,397. Roughly 71% of visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 14,234 ie. it’s the 14,234th most popular site in the US, according to Alexa’s metrics.
- According to Compete.com, Gethuman.com’s number of monthly unique visitors has nearly doubled in the last year and has a ranking of 7,699th most popular website in the US, up from 13,413th a year ago.
- They have a fantastic set of hopes:
- “I hope that companies will finally “get the message”, and realize it is better for the bottom line to treat their paying and potential customers with respect.”
- “I hope that consumers will recognize their power, and steer business towards good companies, and shut down bad companies who will not change.”
- “I hope that some day we will be able to close this website, and to replace it with a “gone fishing” sign.”
All of this digging around made me agree that the inexorable and growing search for human contact in customer experience and customer service is marching on and we’d better get ready.
And, when do you think GetHuman.com will be putting up its “gone fishing” sign?
Thanks to cdedbdme for the image.
