Bring Back the Suggestion Box!

With all the on-line surveys being conducted, you would think that companies would crave more employee and customer feedback, but the truth is that for the vast majority of companies the only kind of feedback they really want is the kind that can be quickly processed in an automated fashion. They want the kind of feedback you can get from those who agree to “take a brief survey after this call.”

Time and again, I find little faults with company products and services, and yet there’s nowhere to point these faults out to the company, just in case they might be interested in improving their product or correcting a mistake.

A recent experience with HP is a great case in point. The company has a whole host of printer models, and I’ve been a loyal printer customer of HP’s for years. But in their Officejet 4730 series, they made what amounts to a nearly comical error in how they provide instructions for printing out and using the “print alignment” page. For this particular home printer, every time you change ink cartridges you need to print out an alignment page, put it on the flatbed and allow the printer to align the ink cartridges again. If you have an HP inkjet home printer, you’re probably familiar with the process.

So I’ve printed alignment pages out for years, model after model, and I get the page out of the printer and I look carefully at the diagram to be sure that I place it on the flatbed with the correct orientation required to complete the alignment.

 But here’s the way HP’s print alignment page for the 4730 series prints out:

Look at it carefully. Notice anything peculiar?

Two squares are at the bottom of the page, underneath the editorial and explanatory diagram, while three squares are at the top of the page. But now look at the instructions for placing the page on your flatbed, and you’ll see that in the illustration, the two squares are at the top of the page while the three squares are at the bottom. So which is it? Which is the correct way to align the page? Editorial at the bottom or two squares at the bottom?

The illustration of the page conflicts with the page itself, making the instructions self-contradictory, and I've aligned the page incorrectly more than once.

I tried my best to find some way to notify HP of this discrepancy, but apparently the company doesn’t really want to hear from its customers – or if they do, they really only want to hear from customers who are willing to sign up for more stuff (monthly ink delivery plans, promotional fru-fru and the like).

I googled “HP suggestions” and the only way to communicate this discrepancy to them seemed to be to do it through one of the HP community forums. So I went to one of the forums and tried to put up a new post, but you can't contribute until you log in. I was invited to log in via LinkedIn, but HP’s app didn’t take the correct login and password from my LinkedIn account. Then I tried Google+ and again, the correct Google+ email and password details were rejected by HP. At this point I gave up. I’m only willing to go so far to help a company monitor its own competence.

Sadly, I’m afraid this kind of experience is not unique to me. Or to HP. Lots of companies say they want to hear from their customers, but what they really mean is they want to hear from you as long as no human labor is required. Absolutely no human labor.

The remedy, folks, is to loosen the restraints. Make it easier for your customers to contact you. Let them contact you anonymously, even – yes, I actually said that! What do you have to lose? You certainly don’t have to make anonymous customer comments public, but wouldn’t you want to at least hear every customer suggestion? And if you could get a higher number of suggestions, or even complaints, by making it easier, then you’d be that much closer to improving your product and service.

So Hewlett Packard, if there’s anyone home at your company, anyone at all who’s monitoring the social media, here’s your chance to fix a small but annoying flaw in one of your products. No charge for my advice. 

Suggestions? Feel free to email me: dpeppers@cxspeakers.com. I won’t make you complete a survey, and I won’t try to sell you anything.