The Museum of Annoying Experiences

Here at Zendesk, the Brand Team works on all aspects of the brand—internally and externally facing. Usually, we’re creating web pages, updating presentation decks, producing videos, and other content. Y’know—creative brand stuff. But sometimes, we get the opportunity to do something totally wacky. This project is one of those.

By now, you may have seen our new slogan, Champions of customer service, floating around.

If not, this blog post explains what the slogan embodies for us as a company. We’re also running a big awareness campaign, so with any luck, you’ll also be inundated with a bunch of charming ads. But as a brand team, we wanted to take it one step further.

Awareness campaigns usually mean papering the world with a message. However, ads on bus stops, in subway stations, and billboards aren’t exactly visible when people across the globe are stuck in their houses due to a global pandemic. As concerts were canceled and art galleries closed, people flocked to the one place we still had left for entertainment: the internet.

We wanted to design an experience that would show the creativity of our brand—something quirky and fun that would help the world discover our campaign in a different way. So we took a different approach…

We thought about what customer service might look like in the future. What if Zendesk, the champions of customer service, changed the world? And what if that meant that bad customer service became a thing of the past?

Enter: The Museum of Annoying Experiences.

[cue futuristic noises] Imagine it is the year 3000. Because the Zendesk ‘Champions of customer service’ campaign was so successful back in the year 2020, bad customer service is now a distant memory. In fact, that period in (future) history has come to be known as the Time Before Champions—or T.B.C.

2020 is so far removed from their daily experience that people in the year 3000 find the idea of bad customer service kind of…funny. (You might compare it to how we visit museums that tell us all about torture in the medieval age.) Visitors flock to the virtual museum, where they get to experience annoying bad customer service, in exhibits where the small details have been comically distorted by time.

“All Mouth, No Pants” features historic remnants of the past, like clothes. As we all know, in the 2020s, all interactions were held on video. Pants became a thing of the past when meeting via virtual internet portals with other humans. From then on, other clothes began to lose their meaning.

Or you could try out The Human Test, which refers to the beloved CAPTCHA test. Because who wouldn’t want to trigger their anxiety when choosing which squares do or do not have a fire hydrant in them?

If you’re a fan of hold music, you’re in luck: the Please Hold… exhibit lets you play along to a sultry saxophone melody that brings you back to all those times you waited for the next available representative. Ah, memories.

There are plenty of other exhibits and games within the museum, each one more annoying than the previous. The experience is one that we’ve been told people “love to hate,” with captivating reviews, such as:

But don’t take our word for it. See for yourself! What could possibly deter you? Find out just how amazingly terrible it is now at annoyingmuseum.zendesk.com.