A state of utter misunderstanding where a client is misinformed by themselves as to the specifications of a product for which they pay.
Most commonly associated with items that have ambiguous meanings, where the client did not take the time to properly investigate a word, or question a sentence.
Symptoms of customer confusion
may include:
Paranoia
Mania
Superiority Complex
An exaggerated sense of veracity
Usage of words the client
may not be entirely familiar with
Customer confusion is often an untreatable, but sometimes temporary, psychiatric illness. The most
common medication, with varying degrees of effect on the illness, is known as customer compensation. This involves providing the confused customer with a portion of a product, or a copy of a product, free of
charge, in hopes that it will compensate them for any loss they believe to have incurred through the purchase of your product. In other cases, a
full refund
may be given, or
credit at a
store given, instead.
There is no known cure for severe customer confusion.
Client: Why do I only have 5,000,000,000 bytes of data? I'm supposed to have 5,368,709,120 bytes of data!
Supplier: We use the hard drive manufacturer's standard
unit size for data measurement.
Client: This is unacceptable! This is
fraud! You are defrauding your entire customer
base!
Supplier: Sir, I'm
sorry, but your contract with us clearly stated that we use this data measurement unit for our products.
Client: But on my
computer, data is measured in units of 1024!
Supplier: I'm
sorry, but we
don't refer to the measurement unit used by software to measure the size of our disks; we use the hard drive manufacter's standard unit size.
Client: I want a refund!
Supplier: I'm afraid we cannot refund you for a used product. We can however either supply you with credit towards your account or supply you with another disk.
Client: Oh, ok. I'll take another disk.
Detailed in the above example is a common
case of customer confusion, where a diskette's size is measured in units of 1000 bytes to a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes to a megabyte and 1000 megabytes to a gigabyte.
