Companies like to measure the quality of “customer
experience,” or CX, that they’re providing, but gaining feedback can be
difficult. I hate it when I’m asked to submit a “very brief” survey and then several
minutes in I have to bail because it’s obviously not brief. I prefer the
happy/neutral/frowny, green/yellow/red buttons in airport restrooms for reporting the cleanliness level.
A videoconferencing platform that I use a lot, at the end of
every meeting, prompts me to “rate the overall experience of [my] meeting,”
from 1 to 5 stars. What if they also had a notes field to type in, since their
query is so incredibly general? Here’s what that might look like. (What follows
is a blend of fact and fiction.)
BEST. MEETING. EVER. We had one of those guys who turns on
his camera even though everyone else’s is turned off, and based on your platform’s
default settings, he ended up being on my screen the whole time (and everyone
else’s too, I’ll bet). I actually got kind of tired of looking at him, but then
he abruptly got up and left the room. So now we were all just looking at his
empty chair, and people started talking shit about him! Freakin’ glorious. Nice
bit of comic relief during a long, boring day of online meetings.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
OMG, I will never forget the “overall experience” of this
meeting. It was our All-Hands Call with like 60 or 70 people, and we all
assumed we’d be muted by default but we weren’t. Most of us figured this out (I
mean, it’s been like three years since we all started
working from home, right?) but a few didn’t, so there was a bit of background chatter as people
were joining. And then we all hear, clear as a bell, “Do you need to go potty
outside?” I was already laughing and then, a second later, some other guy comes
off mute and says, “Nah, I’m good.” I almost cried.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
I really love the half-assed way your platform handles audio
buffering when somebody’s Internet connection is bad. I mean, yeah, perfect
buffering would make it easier to understand people, but who cares? Some
motivational speaker once said, “Nobody will remember what you said but
everyone will remember how you made them feel.” As cheesy as that is, it’s
pretty much true. The highlight of my workday is usually when something goes
wrong, so I love love love it when somebody’s speech slows down to this
incredibly low-pitched crawl, like when something terrible happens on a stupid
TV action show and they show a super-slo-mo of, like, somebody striking out with a
knife and another guy throwing himself in the way yelling, “N-O-O-O-O-O-O” in
the super-slow, low voice. And even better, when your buffering then catches up
it overcorrects and the second half of the person’s sentence is like Alvin and
the Chipmunks! I have to scramble for the mute button because I’m totally
cracking up. Keep up the “good” work!
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
This meeting made my day. It started off with the usual BS,
with people talking over each other and a lot of
mansplaining going on, and then this blowhard named Bruce takes over the screen and starts
sharing some dumb slide and blathering about it, and then someone else takes the
discussion way off track but without taking over the screen share. So Bruce is still
screen-sharing when he totally zones out and starts multitasking. He’s typing
up some email on a totally unrelated topic and we all stop talking and just
watch him for a bit. He’s so checked out he doesn’t notice how quiet it’s gotten
until somebody tells him, “Uh, Bruce, you made a typo.” Bust-ed! Everyone
starts laughing and I’ll bet he pretty much died of embarrassment. Which is
good, because he’s such a tool. He got what he deserved!
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
The bad
Look, I really like your platform, but since you asked, my
overall experience was not good. There’s this douchebag Carl who always commandeers our
meetings to go off about animal rights. He refers to animal husbandry as
“rape,” etc. and once he gets revved up it’s almost impossible to stop him,
even when the professor cuts in and says, “We’re trying to learn Photoshop
here.” I’m tempted to say, “Carl, whenever you open your mouth about animals, I
add ‘veal’ to my shopping list. And I make good.” So anyway, couldn’t you
install a feature where participants could vote to expel someone from the
meeting? Like, you could have some AI widget monitoring the chat and if enough
people type in “Eject Carl” it’ll just do it? I would be the biggest evangelist
for your product if you built that feature…
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
I’ve just about had it. I work for a tech company in Silicon
Valley and yet in this meeting that just ended, I could only understand about
half the people because the other half had crappy Internet connections. I like
how your software shows little green or red bars, so we at least know what the
problem is, but couldn’t you take that a little further and speed-shame these
people? Like, change their title banner to “TOTAL LOSER” if their throughput
sucks? It’s 2022, people. Get a real Internet connection. I’d understand if this
were some little school district in Cat Butt, Wyoming, but come on. This is
Silicon Valley.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
Overall a good audio/video experience, but I can’t give you
more stars because I totally lost my focus during the meeting. Why? Because
some guy was presented with this big award, and in his little impromptu
acceptance speed he said, “I’m truly humbled to win this award.” In what
universe is that true? Winning an award doesn’t humble anybody. It goes right
to their heads, and then they probably feel all sanctimonious when they
graciously say, “I’m humbled.” What a bunch of shit.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
The main presenter in this meeting actually had a lot of
interesting stuff to say, but I could barely understand him because a) the
audio wasn’t that great to begin with, and b) he was wearing a frickin’
COVID mask! I mean, WTF? Does he really think he can spread an actual, non-metaphorical,
living virus over the Internet? I never realized how much I rely on lip-reading
when the sound is bad. Maybe this guy just wanted to make
sure we couldn’t understand him? Whatever, dude.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
Every meeting I’m on, we get people showing up late or not
at all, and then apologizing because their PC rebooted or their home Internet went down. It’s like
the modern day equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.” I guess it’s not enough
that you have a great conferencing app that runs on a smartphone so they don’t
need their PC or WiFi. Could you offer a
deluxe conferencing package with shock ring collars to remind people to use
their fricking phones when their PCs are down? I’d totally pay extra for that.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
How do I lock out late arrivals? I cannot find this in your
help menu. Today some guy showed up 26 minutes late for a 25-minute meeting and
then proceeded to hold the floor for the next ten minutes and I really had to
pee.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
Could you make the audio mute and video mute buttons farther
apart, and/or more distinctive? Today I had both my audio and video muted, and
then someone asked me a question, and I scrambled to un-mute and accidently
un-muted my video but not my audio. So then I suddenly appeared onscreen, with
my disheveled hair and 3-day beard, my mouth going 90 mph but no sound, and five
people all saying at once, “You’re muted!”
So
embarrassing.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
Can you improve the noise-canceling? So many of my colleagues
work from home, the virtual meeting room sounds like a fricking day care. Just a suggestion since apparently some teleworking parents don’t believe in telling their kids to shut the hell up.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
The ugly
Your video conference experience is mostly great. I like how
I can tile all the participants, because with that other mode where it keeps
switching to whoever is talking, I start to get dizzy. But could you add a
feature where I can selectively mute someone’s video feed from my end? God
forgive me, but some of these people are pretty homely.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
Mostly great platform but man, you guys have
got to do something about the fake
background. It’s not just that I get sick of looking at a cheesy backdrop like
the beach (though I do), but the way your software figures out the outline of
the person just isn’t effective enough. Sometimes it looks like a person’s head
is cut out of construction paper, or rendered with really bad VR like that
“
Money for Nothing” video from the ‘80s. There’s this one guy in my meetings who gestures a lot
with his hands, and when he gets animated his hands keep vanishing and then
reappearing on the screen and it’s
totally
distracting.
--~--~--~--~--~--~--
I want to start by saying your videoconferencing is amazing!
I’m one of those people who can remember the very early days of this technology
when the resolution was terrible, all grainy and pixilated with stops and starts
and gaps and everything, and now it’s so smooth and hi-res. In fact, it’s
actually a bit
too hi-res. Which
brings me to my request. You know how you can blur the background, so nobody
can tell your home office is a mess? Well, could you maybe have a feature to
blur the foreground, as in
me? My HD
camera is mercilessly clear and I’m ashamed of my eyebrow dandruff.
—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
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