Never Assume They Know

I have recently received a number of support questions via the phone and email about how to use a CD ROM I had produced.

A surprisingly frequent question was, "When I put the disk in... nothing happens. I get the error message, "NO CD in drive".

It took me a while to figure out what the problem was.

Because I had spent some money packaging the CD ROM in a traditional DVD amray case together with a full colour wrap... some customers automatically assumed that they should be placing the CD ROM into their DVD Players instead of there computers CD ROM drive.

I shouldn't have assumed they knew what the CD ROM logo meant.

We shouldn't assume that our customers know which type of disk we have sent them or what to do with the disk.

For this reason the 'label copy artwork' for all my new 'CD/CD ROM/DVD' based products will start carrying some basic instructions... to reduce the number of support calls I receive...

This will also hopefully stop some customers feeling embarrassed when they realise where they went wrong ;-)

The first step of our CD ROM instructions now reads:

'Place this CD disk, label side up, into the CD ROM drive of your Windows compatible computer'

Or for the DVDs

'Place this DVD, label side up, into your DVD Player and press play'

Look at your own instructions. Do they assume too much?If they do, change them now and reduce customer problems and potential support issues.