Customer service is everywhere. And when it’s bad, it sucks for all of us – because we’re all customers. Zendesk is known as The Champions of Customer Service – because the products we build make the customer experience better for everyone. Our goal is to tell an interesting story that gets people thinking about how pervasive customer service is, and how whether it’s good or bad can actually have a big impact on our lives.
We want to do all that in a way that is a little weird, but fun to engage with. The kind of thing that might make the business half of your brain say, “This is a brand that knows what it’s doing, and that can help me make things better for my customers.” But it also might make the human side of your brain “Oh hey - those Zendesk people are pretty great. That’s the kind of company I want to do business with.”
The goal for Zendesk is to create a world where bad customer service is a thing of the past. But when pandemic lockdown took outdoor advertising off the table in 2020 and 2021, we had to think of a different way to let people know.
To do that, we imagined a world in the distant future, in which bad customer service has been completely eliminated. In fact, not only has it been eliminated, it’s been gone for so long that people don’t even really remember what it was like. Of course, the people of this utopian future world are smart. They know that those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it. So they have set up a museum to inform themselves and future generations to come.
But here’s the thing: In the distant future customer service is pure, seamless bliss. It’s been so long since anyone experienced bad customer service, that they don’t really know all the details. So they have to guess – and most of the time they get it hilariously wrong.
We created an annoying/amazing/immersive experience to let people travel into the future…so they can experience the past. In The Museum of Annoying Experiences—an interactive online exhibit—visitors can explore comically broken customer service experiences. Along the way they learn more about what’s so wrong with our own contemporary customer experience, and how companies can use Zendesk to make it better for all of us.
The museum was impressively annoying. At a time when people were dreading their screens, The Museum of Annoying Experiences was able to hold people’s attention for a whopping average of 3 minutes dwell time – almost double the average for an experience of this type.
The experience trafficked thousands of visitors and won site of the day on both FWA and Awwwards. More importantly, it generated a 27% increase in traffic to the Zendesk website the month of campaign launch (April 2021), and helped increase unaided recall of the brand by almost 40%.
