Recently, after a flight out of town, I arrived at my destination in the middle of the night to find my digital camera missing from my luggage. To immediately file a claim, I found a phone number for the airline online. After several tries, the line was finally answered by an automated voice system that didn’t address missing luggage, much less missing contents. Instead of increasing business efficiency, online and automated phone systems are quite effectively killing customer loyalty.
Here’s a scenario familiar to anyone calling a big-name business with a dreaded automated answering system: “For service X, press 1. For service Y, press 2. For service Z, press 3.” But you don’t want X, Y, or Z, and often there is no option to reach a real person. So what’s a paying customer to do? Very often the company, whether it’s a credit card company, insurance company, bank, airline, or a government office, directs customers to write a letter-the dreaded paper and ink, sent by (gasp!) snail mail! Old technology has come full circle. We’re back to letters, a centuries-old, largely ceremonial practice that enables companies to more effectively dodge customer service. (Post script: airlines in the throes of bankruptcy don’t honor claims for missing valuables.)
In a more efficient way, connectors are bringing medical equipment up to the minute with properties like zero-insertion force, better EMI shielding, and more channel density. Read all about it in this month’s cover article by Murtaza Fidaali at ITT Electronic Components on p. 11, “ZIF connectors empower medical equipment.”
For the latest on “legacy technlogy,” don’t miss the interesting feature article on p. 14, “Telco vs. cable networks: connectors bring cable up to snuff,” penned by Bill Spink, connector design manager at Semflex. In the discussion of old Western Bell phones in the article, Dale Reed, vice president of Trompeter/Semflex adds, “If you are fortunate to still have one of these classic old phones, keep it. First, you can impress your grandchildren with a relic that really works, and second, you have a piece of equipment guaranteed to work when the electricity goes out. And if you have a rotary dial, so much the better, as technology is now moving toward voice-actuated to replace push-button tone and pulse dialing. At our family’s old summer cottage in New England, we still use the original dial phone provided by Bell that was manufactured by Western Electric. The kids think it is the ‘coolest thing;’ it is often mentioned in the same sentence as the mile-long beach, fried clams, and lobster.”
In the category of “that’s-so-truisms”: “Before cable, we were all wireless. We used UHF antennas. Then we had to pay to be wired, and now we have to pay to be wireless again.” - John Yurtin, Delphi Connection Systems, overheard at the Fleck Connection Congress. Old technology comes full circle, indeed.
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Valerie Coffey
Editor-in-Chief
valeriec@pennwell.com
