How Bad Customer Service Affects Design

The Analogy

I taught guitar lessons for several years. I really enjoyed it. In fact, I would still be doing if it weren’t for some interesting life circumstances that made me take a detour. I’ll probably teach again at some point.

I love it, because I love being a gateway for someone to learn this instrument that I’ve devoted so much of my life to.

I’ve met many music teachers through the years. Most of them are wonderful people that are giving back to their community. But there are a few that probably should’ve never gotten into teaching in the first place.

Those people frustrate me, because they act like gatekeepers against people learning the instrument. Elitism and musical training have been uneasy bedfellows for too long.

When someone is learning the guitar, there are common mistakes that many people make. I often address those, up front, so that students have things to watch out for before a bad habit begins to form. But I also addressed them with kindness and empathy. Every time. The fact that the student might still make the mistake is an expected part of learning. I made them. We all made them.

When the student makes that mistake, it’s not because they are stupid, or incompetent, or unwilling to listen to me. It’s because they are in the cognitive process of learning a new skill. As they practice, and recognize the mistake to correct it, then they are progressing exactly as they should.

It would be cruel…sociopathic, even…to know that someone is paying you to teach them the instrument, and then treat them with contempt for not being able to immediately play perfectly.

To have that reaction, is to be a bad teacher. It is not a reflection on the student.

If I teach something one way, and a student seems to not understand, the problem is with me. I’m the person being paid to teach, so I need to adjust my methods until we find something that helps my student progress. If I can’t do that, then my students should be paying someone else.

The Problem

As a formally trained audio engineer, there is one piece of hardware that is quite important: an audio interface.

As with most technology, audio interfaces can run the gamut in price, from inexpensive starter devices, to several thousand dollars in the professional range.

When I was looking at purchasing my professional audio interface, there were a few solid choices on the market at the time. But the one I ended up choosing was by a German company called RME.

They make truly excellent hardware, and that’s part of what drew me to them.

That was 8 years ago.

In the 8 years that I’ve owned their interfaces, I’ve had a few times through the years where I needed to look up how to do certain advanced tasks.

That’s when I finally encountered their manuals, and their customer service.

The Point

RME’s user manuals are poorly written. They’re accurate enough, factually…but they don’t communicate information well at all. They’re written by engineers, and it shows. It’s as if they wrote the manual, and then asked their co-engineer to proof read it. I can just hear “Technical writer?? What a waste of money!” oozing from every page.

That might be forgivable, but then, you get on their forums to ask for help. What a burning dumpster fire.

I can’t tell you how many posts from RME reps say “it’s in the manual” with a thinly veiled bit of elitist disdain, or condescendingly ask things like “is it really so hard?” to a customer asking a question.

The more that I scoured the forums over the years, the more irritable I became.

It hits me harder now than it did at first, because I’ve been spending more time lately with things like The Design of Everyday Things, and Universal Principles of Design.

I’ve also found something like a creative “calling” in moving towards the field of User Experience (UX).

Before, it felt like an annoying miscommunication.

Now, it’s much more clearly a failure of company culture.

It’s also a failure of design. Scratch a little at the surface of the arrogant, dismissive customer service, and you actually find a resistance to the idea that they could improve their product. To RME, their product, and their manual, are already perfect. It’s all those idiots that can’t read the gem they’ve written, that are the problem.

If customers express confusion or frustration, RME thinks that the problem is the customer. The customer just didn’t read good, apparently. Or they just can’t seem to understand RME’s obviously-brilliant design.

As such, RME’s design, by definition, will never truly be great. They have a compelling-but-imperfect product, and they see no need to be open to feedback.

They willfully sacrifice the opportunity to see small areas of design failure in their product, and those failures will continue to add up.

The company’s attitude towards customer feedback affects their ability to design something even better than they already have. Their arrogance is actually a kind of blindness.

Many companies fail to improve their product, but most don’t desire that outcome if they can avoid it. RME just doesn’t seem to care.

In this case, I actually think it makes it worse that they really do make excellent hardware. To have an excellent product, that could be revolutionary if they had a willingness to incorporate customer feedback, is a truly a disappointing failure of company leadership.

I’ve advocated strongly for RME hardware in my career. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on their hardware.

I won’t ever do any of the above again.

That’s the power of poor user experience, and bad customer service.