Hey Zoom, you can’t annoy me into subscribing

01 Nov Hey Zoom, you can’t annoy me into subscribing

The warning tells me I’ve got 10 minutes before my Zoom call ends. I’m on a free plan, and once upon a time, talking to one friend had no time limit. Things have changed. The call ends mid-sentence. So we both click the meeting link again and pick up our conversation.

Inconvenient, absolutely.
Annoying, definitely.

I don’t need a subscription for the few times and month I use Zoom, and interrupting me isn’t likely to change my mind.

I get it. Zoom is in a tough spot. Individual meeting rooms and genuine back-to-back calls leave few ways to stop people from jumping into another session to extend the free meeting limit. However when your mission is to “make communications frictionless and secure,” try harder to keep the first half of the promise.

Thinking about their problem sent me back to an article I wrote in 2017 where I described the dance of promises and experience …

The dance of promises made by an organisation and the experience it delivers can be everything from the smooth glide of Fred and Ginger circling the floor to the awkward missteps and sore toes of a first waltz.

Experience and promises circle each other in continual motion. Where one begins and one ends should be impossible to see. But that’s not the case. My experience leads. And in the process, the experience either keeps the promise or carelessly stomps on its toes.

The product that stops working the second time I use it. The friendly customer service person who rebuffs my questions. The lofty goals of the off-site, sidelined in day-to-day decisions. The store that shuts early. The humdinger of an idea stymied by red tape.

Amid today’s “hustle or you’ll get left behind” mindset, experience is the “new black”. We love to feel like we are doing something and even better if it is shiny, fun. So the allure of the design process associated with experience has enticed many organisations to forge ahead with little understanding of how to deliver the result and make the associated promises.

I’m not only talking about customer experience, employee experience is just as relevant and they are impossible to separate.

Before you can aim where to go, you’ve got to know where you are now. Often, the work to understand the current state experience misses this step. Because in addition to disentangling WHAT the current experience looks like, clarity will only come when you also delve into HOW and WHY it looks that way.

And it needs to be an ongoing process. Every action and decision of an organisation make the current state the future state. Sure you power up the Delorean and try to leap ahead, but don’t be surprised if once you get there, there has moved.

Which brings me back to the interplay of promises and experience. The day the doors open for the first time promises and experience start their dance and never stop. Every time a promise is delivered (or not) by experience it becomes the new promise. That’s good when the promise is kept, bad when it is broken.

The key is to realise they are a relationship, not separate entities, but a couple, circling the floor in your organisation together.

So to add to the store of value called brand, make sure any discussion about experience includes promises and vice versa.

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Returning to Zoom, the shift to limit some calls to 40 minutes probably made sense somewhere on a spreadsheet. I can almost hear the comments, “If we create a bit of friction, they’ll upgrade.” There was likely some financial modelling and a discussion calling on principles of behavioural economics to justify the decision.

I wonder if they thought about people’s experience. About the promise held in the mission? And if anyone asked whether annoying customers was the best way to deliver either.

Thanks for reading.