People need to step back for a few short seconds before they act and realize how their conduct might affect someone else.

That is, indeed, a bad user experience.

I wonder what sort of training they get for these sorts of calls? It does seem like the dots aren’t always connected up as they should be. I remember getting mugged and the woman who answered the 999 call telling me off really quite rudely. I appreciate that she had a job to do but she told me that she wasn’t going to put me through to the police until I “calmed down”. I admit that I was crying and shouting but was still able to make myself understood and I had just been mugged!

In the interest of not exchanging “police phone manners and how they did me wrong” it never ceases to amaze me how some people don’t seem to think before they do something? This type of call really can cause a huge amount of distress and it makes the importance of understanding your ‘users’ even more important. As there seems to be a lack of empathy at the most inappropriate moment then perhaps some persona boards and some scenarios wouldn’t go amiss!

Truly an extreme example of a poor customer experience.

Yes I know you are not excusing them, I think that is letting them off the hook. Aren’t they trained in how to speak to people, to use non-confrontational language and so on? If so, then this is the flip side.

Awful experience, I’d imagine, and makes all those “nice to be nice” stickers I’ve seen stuck next to phones in offices all the more pertinent. Maybe it’s just a simple ‘mind hack’ that is required to put the person making the call into the ‘persona’ of the person they are calling.

“Who are you calling and what will they think?”