Jananas

I believe in building for the long term. In business, this means planning for 10, 25, or even 50 years into the future. Except that I work in an era where corporate focus is on short term gains. From shareholders, investment bankers, and a market focused on making a quick buck to executives and middle managers whose bonuses are based on revenue gains or costs cut today, the entire industry is saying ‘now, now, now’.

There are short term gains to be made. Those shouldn’t be ignored. But when they are the sole focus of a business, new products are rushed to market and short cuts are taken. In the back end, operational issues pile up and band aids are applied liberally to make things work (for now).

Each week cut from a testing plan, each product launched before its ready, each band aid applied means more work in the future. It means that five years down the road testing plans will be twice as long. Why? Because each band aid is a separate set of testing conditions. The more you apply, the more conditions you’ll have to test. The more opportunity there is for things to go wrong.

That’s just taking the basic systems into account. You can just as easily layer on a human factor. As staff turns over, the history and knowledge about each band aid (its reason for being implemented, how it worked, what it impacted) is more than likely lost – if only because they were applied in such a hurry that they weren’t properly documented. It was crunch time, there was pressure from above to get the fix in today, now, five minutes ago! Your operations department probably no sooner had this particular solution in place and there the next middle manager was breathing down their necks about why this other issue hadn’t been fixed.

The staff who put a fix into place might remember what they were thinking when they did it. Staff who came onboard later likely has no idea. And if they do, its because they put the time and effort into figuring it out – time and effort that could have been spent accomplishing something for the future instead of research past mistakes in order to be able to fix them.

Over time, this problem gains momentum and gets bigger. Until one day its big enough that it begins to hinder your ability to grow or to make revenue or to get to market.

So what do you do differently? Take a step back and think about how a decision today will show up in the system five or ten years from now. You take an extra week testing it out. You pay more attention to business requirements so that you don’t need (as many) band aids. And you know what? You listen to your operations staff. Give them time (and the space) to spend fixing the system every day so that its maintained.

I have a story about a company who had more product managers (the people coming up with the ideas and campaigns and work) than they did operations staff (the people actually implementing the work, testing it, and responsible for the overall state of the system). That isn’t feasible in the long term. And if you’re not around in the long term, then you aren’t really much of a business are you.

While I was in Thailand I adopted a dog. I had to pay for his crate and flight home and Paypal was the only timely option to pay for it. So I made an abnormally large payment, especially when compared to my normal eBay or etsy purchases, and my account was essentially blocked due to suspected fraud. Not unexpected on my part. They even sent me an email to notify me, which I was thankful for.

So I login in an attempt to rectify the situation. They ask me to change me password and security question, check and check. Get that finished and they need me to confirm that I’m me. There are several ways that I can do this…

1. I can confirm my location… Except that I’m in another country without access to most of my bills (which have my address) and access to a fax machine/ability to mail info in. I do have some electronic bills, but their system doesn’t accept pdfs and instead only accepts jpgs or gifs. Only my bills are sent as pdfs, so I would have had to take a screen capture or convert the file or something – all things that are a little difficult to do when I’m not at my own computer. And all things that require me, as the customer to go through another step to get them the information. So I’m already a little annoyed. [As an aside, I asked the CSR when I called in tonight why they didn't accept pdfs and their answer was that its because pdfs can contain viruses. Yup, totally possible. But (and to me this is a big But), you are an internet company. You should be able to handle some level of attack by viruses if only because its going to happen at some point. What you shouldn't do is make it difficult for your customers to get you the information that you're asking for. Don't make them wait longer than necessary. Don't make them convert files (many of them may not have the skill set necessary to even do that). Its simple - make it easy for your customers to deal with you.]
2. I can confirm my bank account or credit card number… On the Paypal website my bank account or credit card numbers appear as XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-1234 (credit card example used because its easier for me to remember the number of digits). So I would have assumed that ‘confirming’ this would mean entering the entire number, e.g. 1234-1234-1234-1234. If they match, then voila, I’m me. Nope. What this meant was that I could add another bank account or credit card and undergo the process where Paypal sends a couple of pennies, I confirm the exact amount and then the account has been added to my list. But this takes a few days and I may not want Paypal to have access to even more of my account information. Or I may just not have any other accounts. Regardless, this isn’t “confirming” my information its adding new information, which is not the same thing.
3. I can confirm my telephone number. Now I couldn’t do this while traveling because I didn’t have my phone with me while I was in Asia (for obvious expensive Canadian roaming reasons). However, when I looked into this some more this evening Paypal doesn’t even confirm mobile phone numbers. Really? Lets take a step back and think about who uses your service. I’m going to make some wild assumptions here and guess that it tends to be younger, internet savvy people. Who probably use their mobile exclusively and have ditched their landlines in the last few years (if not way before that). In fact, the only people I know who still have landlines are my parents. And they certainly aren’t buying things on eBay. Again, its simple – make sure that your policies make sense for your customers.

I’d forgotten that I hadn’t dealt with this and then went and bought something on eBay tonight. Something that had to be paid for right away. So I called in and had the block removed from my limited account. And the kicker, their 800 number was US only so I got to pay long distance charges to talk to a person because their system was so badly set up that I couldn’t do something simple on my own.

Its things like this that make me wonder. What use is policy if it makes it difficult for your customers to do what you want? Where does common sense belong in the decision making process? Why isn’t there more of a focus on usability?

These aren’t mistakes that are unique to Paypal. Rather, this experience highlights some of the things that frustrate me so much about most businesses.

This week I received a voicemail from Maytag asking me to call a number (1-800-326-2742) because my fridge was being recalled due to a fire hazard (official recall site). So I go look in my fridge and write down the model and serial number. I call in. I answer a bunch of questions before finding out that the number is only for The Brick (who I didn’t buy from) and the recall is only for top mounted or side by side freezers (I have a bottom mounted). At this point I’m a little annoyed, but figure that I should follow up with Maytag themselves just in case.

I get the Maytag Recall hotline number (1-877-329-3304) and call in. We go through the entire rigamorole of giving personal information, model and serial number, purchase date, etc. all over again. Get to the end and the lady on the other end of the line tells me that my fridge is fine.

I suggest that they should look into the fact that customers who aren’t part of the recall are being notified. The CSR responds that they are likely trying to contact as many customers as possible, essentially so that they can cover everyone who is impacted.

I’m annoyed. I admittedly didn’t do any research into the issue before calling, although I think that its fair to assume that when you’ve been contacted by the manufacturer that you are included in the recall.  I’m still annoyed. I went to sleep last night half worried that my house might burn down. I sounded like an idiot to the two CSRs I spoke with (and yes, this is frustrating – especially when its not your fault!). I wasted a half hour of my time following up on something that wasn’t an issue at all (if I’d had to call later in the day, this would have been real minutes on my cell plan and thus cost me real money).

And all because as a company Maytag isn’t able to manage your data effectively.

Sometime earlier this year Rogers redid their on demand services. Its been bugging me ever since and this morning I was finally motivated to take a picture of the screen that drives me jananas.

When I want to watch on demand, I punch in the channel number (e.g. 308 or 309). The following screen comes up.

I’ve already selected the channel I want to watch, so why do I have to press another button in order to get there? My guess is that loading the on demand channels takes up relatively more bandwidth, so they don’t want people who are channel surfing to waste that bandwidth/slow the system down when they flip past it. Understanding that, why are you making the experience of people who want to watch this channel more difficult?

Instead, why not implement a time delay on the channel? Five seconds would be enough so that people who are flipping past wouldn’t ‘load’ the channel (and use up bandwidth) and it would also mean that the rest of us who want to watch the channel don’t have to press another button to get to it.

Underlying all of this is that you want to make it easier for people to use your product, not make it more difficult. All they’ve accomplish for me is that everytime I try to watch things on demand I get frustrated and annoyed. When customers are annoyed just by receiving their basic services (i.e. those that they pay for), they are going to be a lot less accomodating and understanding when a real service or quality issue comes up.

I’ve watched a lot of outsourcing happen within businesses. As a customer I’ve had plenty of bad experiences (although to be fair, I probably couldn’t tell you how many good experiences I’ve had as those would have been too similar to a non-outsourced experience to identify). Overall, I’m not a huge fan of outsourcing. I have found that, more often than not, companies rush to outsource because they see the initial cost savings. The increased costs and time associated with management of the outsourced provider tend to downplayed. I believe that this is dangerous given how important things like quality assurance and customer experience are to a business’ long term survival.

Here’s an example from a previous life that illustrates what can happen when outsourcing doesn’t work out quite the way that you’ve planned…

Customer: I’d like to report a car accident.

Insurance CSR: What happened sir?

Customer: I hit black ice.

CSR: Sir, ice is white.

The problem in this particular case was that the CSR was in India and the customer was in Canada. The phenomenon of black ice occurring in the winter was something that an individual in a more tropical client would have never encountered. In this particular case, the CSR had no way or personal experience that would help them understand that this situation was indeed a valid reason for a car accident. And while we can rationally understand this, as a customer who has just been in a car accident the overall result is a company who isn’t able to help him.

With outsourcing, a lot of time and effort is put into training the CSRS. Training on accents so that they sound more like the country calls are originating from. Training to help the CSRS make sense of cultural differences. The problem here is that cultural training is only as good as the person defining the potential scenarios that could happen. This person also has to have an in depth understanding of both cultures, otherwise cultural differences can impact the quality of service (through no one’s fault other than the initial decision to move the service provider).

I know that I write a lot about customer experience. Its because I believe that it vital to long term success of your business. You may have to spend more money in the short term (i.e. more testing before you launch, a better designed product, etc.), but I believe that such investments pay off in the longer term. Better products today mean more satisfied customers (as an aside, they also mean easier product launches in the future and therefore save money on development down the line). Customers who are more satisfied and who have good interactions with the company (and these can still be good even when the situation that caused them isn’t) become loyal customers. And loyal customers don’t need to be bribed to stay or threatened with contracts. They will stick with you in rough patches and recommend you to friends.

And that’s why you need to be careful when you outsource. Because business isn’t just about tomorrow’s revenues, its about revenues 25 years down the line.