Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts

I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website?0 And was I aware that I could manage my account online?1 And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp?2

Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that whoever was in charge of predicting call volumes had recent suffered a traumatic brain injury and was unable to count beyond five without pulling their other hand out of their fundament.

The cheerful woman warbled through her pre-recorded script and was suddenly replaced with a hideous electronic monstrosity. I recorded the call3 so that you can experience this monument to synthetic glory!

This is from a company whose website gushes about how innovative it is. AI is transforming its business at scale! Dedicated to technological excellence and delivering ISO accredited quality in all its divisions! And yet, somewhere, someone decided that customer experience was good enough.

"Dogfooding" is a sacred practice in the tech industry. Use your own products. That's it. That's all you have to do. For example, if you work for Slack - you can't use Teams for your messaging solution. You have to show people that you have faith in your own products.

But it goes deeper than that. When I used to work for mobile phone networks, they asked us to spend time in call centres. It isn't enough to receive a quarterly report on customer KPIs. You have to hear the rage in customers' voices as they struggle with your billing system. Perhaps that will convince you to have empathy with the people paying to use your product.

There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer. When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line?

It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey.

By contrast, I recently cancelled a subscription to a small start-up's service. Someone from their senior leadership team asked if they could call to chat about why I cancelled. I said sure and had an enjoyable half-hour whinge / chat about their failings. At almost every complaint, they replied either "Oh, yeah, I also find that annoying" or "Huh, I've not experienced that, but I can see why it would suck."

At no point did they ever say "Our metrics don't show a problem" or "Do people really care about that?"

Maybe I was being flattered. Maybe it's a waste of senior leadership time to start every meeting with a ritual phone call to the call centre. Maybe I'm the only one who gets annoyed when people can't be bothered to put the bare minimum effort into their job.

But, maybe, breathing in the noxious output of barely digested slurry is the only way to get people to improve their diet.