dear every tech support company

I spent the better part of the last few days trying to buy a bus pass. More specifically trying to set up a bus pass account for a brand new system and at the end of about 36 hours I have not been successful. Jockeyed between two companies using a system that is clearly not user tested and being given some answers that are clearly incorrect I’m am quite literally so tense I don’t want to deal with this anymore but I need that damned bus pass. Edit – in the almost 6 weeks since I wrote this I am not completely done with this set up!

Some handy suggestions to create less actual fury for your users.

1.       Especially if a system is new write and post in a logical place clear instructions and include information for how to proceed if something is different from the way it has worked in the past. In this case the former company would take direct withdrawals from your bank account. New company only accepts Visa or MasterCard debit. Apparently there was a paper form to deal with those of us without the acceptable debit card. It took 3 phone calls, 1 missed, and several threads of twitter interaction before anyone mentioned this to me. And even then I had to ask for the link.

 

2.       Do not tell people their browser is incompatible. If you are dealing with consumers and not business people there are at least four browsers you should be set up for. They are Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.  A quick Google search puts these browsers in top 5 lists consistently. Sure every list has them ranked in different order but they are always there.

3.       As much as I hate scripts sometimes the information from them is needed for your staff. I get it. Phone centre jobs suck and you usually do not get the best of the crop for those positions but please arm these people with information. By the time most of us get to contacting a company we’re angry and frustrated. We understand that the voice on the phone is not the reason we’re angry but right or wrong they’re who we are dealing with. We need accurate, clear information and explanations. What I’ve heard for the past few days is ‘incompatible’ and ‘you can do that on our website’. Turns out there’s an issue with your website so I can’t. Which is why I’m calling.

4.       Deal with people. I spent quite a bit of time on twitter yesterday. I find it incredibly useful for getting companies to listen to you. I got a response right away from the company no longer offering the service. Most of what they answered was platitudes but at least they were paying attention to me. It took the new company, the one I’m trying to pay about 15 interactions before they finally piped in. Ditto read your messages before responding. I had so many bots answer things I didn’t ask yesterday. I am a bit of a weirdo but I always include my browser and OS information. If your first response is asking me these questions it is completely clear that you did not give my message more than a cursory glance.

5.       Do user acceptance testing. By this I mean have people who do not know what your website is supposed to do test it. When you do your own testing you test with a bias.

If your website is designed to take money please make it so people can pay you. There are so many testing shopping cart apps out there. Do not, to use a very overused phrase, reinvent the wheel. The wheel, so simple in its form, works. 

Please, please, please stop telling users they are at fault. They are not. They may not have done things the way you set them up but users act on a series of learned reactions.They learn each time they users systems and apps and that knowledge is compounded over time. For those of us in Gen X we've been through several radical OS changes and had to adapt to all of them. I personally find all this intuitive 'helping' that software and apps do these days completely counter-intuitive because I learned systems when everything was done by me. Yes I've had to adapt but sometimes my instinct isn't your instinct. And for Millennials and Gen Xed they are even more tech savvy than anyone. They don't need things dumbed down. Whatever generation we are; we've contacted you for help. Help us.

still missing the point - not really a post

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

I went looking for some info on putting the long form census back in place and found this. So maybe it we had the census Target might have gotten it. But I doubt it.

your lipservice is chapping

I’d like to think of myself as a sort of consumer advocate but for now I’m my own primary customer save the occasional friend.  And generally I get some sort of resolution.  My own experience has been that stating the issue clearly, without accusation, using dates and whatever back up is available helps get things done.  Generally I get either my money back or some sort of agreed upon restitution to the issue. 

But there are two kinds of companies who drive me a little wonky.  Those who do not offer any sort of customer assistance and those who say they do, but really are the first.  I’m currently stuck in the middle of two companies with a combined offer that are doing both.  

Back in May I signed up for a limited offer TopBox deal that included a subscription to a Rogers owned magazine – LouLou.  The transaction included an opt-out option, which I decided to forgo, but no other steps to sign up necessary – to the best of my recollection.  I’ll fully admit that I’m not 100% certain there was more required, but arguably they had my address for the makeup box delivery and I’d paid in full via credit card for the promotion.  After that, I forgot about it for awhile.  I mean all magazine subscriptions say they take 6 to 8 weeks to start.  But by September my subscription was still noticeably absent, so I started down the follow up road.  As it stands today, we’re at an impasse.

 

Yes, I was a little cantankerous on Twitter.

It started with an e-mail to TopBox directly; got a polite but not terribly useful reply.  I tried LouLou, and got the same.  And now we were playing the ‘it’s not me, it’s them’ game.  So I took to Twitter.  And got more lip service.  As it stands after almost a month since this started, I have heard from neither company and have no resolution, and still no subscription.  I did however get a promotional e-mail to join TopBox; and as you might imagine, I’m not so keen to do this.  

Sure there’s always the good ol’ ‘buyer beware’ caveat.  And yes, I’m no fan of Rogers already, but now I have to put TopBox on a ‘not sure I want to do business with you’ list because of a $10* transaction, and apparently, I’m going to write a blog post about it.  Sure you looked for a second like you were doing something on Twitter, but in the end you didn’t, did you.

And because human nature inherently does not reward the good guy, I will relay the story of excellent customer service.  

As I’ve written before I’ve signed up a makeup sampling program, Ipsy.  For about $15 a month you get a package of ‘goodies’ every month.  So every month about the end of the second week of the month I get a bright pink bubble wrap envelope in my mail box with said goodies.   But not this month.  In spite of routing notices from the two postal systems handling this package, there was no delivery (to my house).  Contacted the company, we went back and forth a few times, with a suggestion I give it a couple more days, but when 4 days later there was no package, I got a ‘no problem, we’ll  get you a new one, sorry for the inconvenience’ e-mail and 4 days later a tracking code.  The following week a new package arrived with most of the goodies I was supposed to get, with one acceptable substitution.  No lip service, just service and a resolution. 

 

This month, this particular sight was missing.  Until it wasn't.

Fortunately I did get some lip balm in a recent Ipsy bag to relieve all the chapping caused by TopBox.

I write about these things in large part because I feel that the key to continued success is great customer service, no matter what your company is, or its size.  Sure some companies and some products can’t always be replaced or fixed, but there are ways to work with your customers to ensure that they feel as if you’ve heard them and you are trying to come up with a resolution.  If I’ve entered in a purchase agreement that is final sale or that clearly spells out that there are no returns/refunds then I take my chances.  If this is not the case what is the harm in trying to service your customer base, because as the old shampoo commercial goes, I told two friends…

* The approximate value of the subscription portion of the offer.

is it gonna go my way?

It doesn't take much effort to find a bad opinion of any company online.  There's always someone willing to dish about their negative experience in a public format.  Yelp seems to be a good place for these types of reviews.  And as I’ve said in the past, those opinions are worth looking at but also worth the consideration that one bad review does not a bad company make. 

(And we all know that people won't/don't/can't be bothered to give good reviews), so.

Having said that, and in the same breathe, it's pretty safe to say that as a company you can probably do 'OK' when servicing the bulk of the public, but it takes some special talent to blow it when it comes to people who are marginalized by special needs.  And I will come back to this point.  I promise.

But first let's talk about a growing trend in the lack of car ownership, in which we also need to talk about intercity mass transit - and when I say talk, but I mean bemoan the lack of decent options.  You can rent a car, or do car share, but that can be pricey and if you're heading out of town to stay with a friend you have to deal with parking.  Also forget getting either a car or a deal during the holidays, my experience is that the 'deal' is you get the pay extra for those dates.  You can use some sort of mass transit, such as VIA; which is expensive and have a laughable schedule unless you are going to Montreal or Toronto; GO, which is great during the week but forget the weekends; and lastly Greyhound (and I'm going to lump other bus lines in here) the final bastion of low cost mass transit and they know it.

Here's the deal.  Greyhound is as non-customer centric as you can get.  They're in the business of selling you a ticket and running a bus from point A to B.  It's up to you to figure out how to buy the ticket, how to get on the correct bus, make certain your luggage and you get on and off the bus and if there's an issue, you're just going to have to suck it up.  Having said that it costs me about $20 to go back and forth to Kitchener on a given weekend and generally, the price is the same no matter what - assuming you buy it ahead of time and pay a little extra for the convenience of printing your own ticket.

We've all seen the news.  Megabus (who is not Greyhound) runs into bridge, into another bridge, starts on fire. Mentally unstable man (on Greyhound) had a psychotic break and it's really, really bad. But the article that caught my eye was the one about a girl, confined to a wheelchair, essentially dumped in a snow bank on a cold day, for no reason that made sense, and in response, Greyhound states "We pride ourselves on stellar customer service and a stellar travel experience."

As a long time customer of Greyhound's my only response to that is 'whathPHFFF".  And I’m not just talking about this particular individual, who really got the short end of the stick on this one.  I’m talking in general. See and then after they decided that maybe they could do better than ‘stellar’.

I'll soften this rant a little by stating that, for the most part, I’ve never taken issue with the drivers' themselves.  I use this service on average about 10 times a year and have for the bulk of my adult life, so I’m eventually gonna run into a dufas or two.  But as a company the service is laughable.

During the December ice storm that hit Ontario, I got up on a day I was planning to travel to a birthday party for my niece.  Airlines, trains, TTC and even CAA were filing news posts, twitter and updates to their own websites.  Greyhound 'cannot foresee delays by weather'.

While the TTC updates by the second, Greyhound has little to say.

So what do we do?  Take the train - which I would love to but at twice the price and a schedule that returns me to Toronto after 11 p.m. on a Sunday night (from Kitchener) this is not an option. So we stick with the reliable and annoying Greyhound until another low cost option presents itself.  In the meantime I'll continue to rile Greyhound on Twitter if only to amuse myself and feel some sort of satisfaction that I said something.  And since we all seem to be voting about something this year, why not talk about intercity transport options.  We're a big country but in places we're not. Like southern Ontario, where a few hours between cities should allow options for travel that are reliable, affordable and decent.

I mean, have you ever tried to pee on one of those things?

consumption

In addition to the time I spend objecting to and about companies and the various levels of service I experience; and besides the endless hours I while away jumping from link to link on the internet I am currently spending a great deal of time considering with what my next job should be.  Of late, and after what seems to be the world’s longest mid(ish)-life crisis, I feel like there needs to be a distinct and planned approach to the next stage of my life.  And barring the idiosyncrasies of my own internal thought process, it does, at times, feel as if this task consumes me.

There was also a joke I was trying to work in about having spent the last several weeks being sick with cold and chest infection, thereby having ‘consumption’ but I just couldn’t get the tempo of it worked out.

So as I think on and about how and where I want to take my next venture; I also seem to be thinking about my new encounters in the Twitterverse and my unintentional discovery of how some marketers are using this, and other social platforms, to extend their customer service outreach. And I’m fascinated.

@TTCHelps – the online persona of TTC customer liaison is prompt in replying to people in a forthright manner.  In fact, I tripped over them very early in my app adoption kibitzing about the on train ‘are-they-aren’t-they’ announcements on the subway one morning.  To my flippant tweet that I couldn’t decide if the TTC announcements were informative or infuriating, they replied ‘hopefully more informative than annoying’ and with that simple exchange I started to get it.

Next was @CampbellCares – the soup company that noted my tweet complaining, while suffering my cold, that I could no longer find my preferred Turkey Chunky soup and that the Chicken flavor just didn’t cut it.  Not only did they respond; they tracked down stores nearby that I might be able to find my favoured flavor at.  Then @FURminator_Inc. favourited my tweet about my, somewhat, bizarre affinity for their pet brush.

Ricki’s, who is not on Twitter but does use Facebook, after announcing a sale and then having their website crash, did take the time to answer each person who commented on the issue on the FB feed.  In a world where using the comment feature to acknowledge the issue globally is available it was a decided personal touch to reply to each of, even if they did recycle their response.

The IKEA follow up, via a real live person, discussed in this blog, also fell into this sweep of service responses.  But I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed that after I lauded the employee who assisted me so well to @IKEACanada five days ago and they have yet to acknowledge my approval.  And in my estimation a bit of an error on their part.

The friend who strongly encouraged my adoption of Twitter and its little unique universe and I have discussed my interest in both this new (to me) medium and how it could move customer experience and service into the most interesting places - which in turn gets me thinking, again, and more, about where I should take my next career venture.  

The next steps are not entirely, yet, apparent to me but I do believe that service is the next great venture of business and somehow I’d like to be involved.

why size matters

Anyone who has ever purchased clothes knows that size isn’t consistent.  In fact there is no such thing as a size ‘standard’.  Each manufacturer sets their own sizing and, usually, tend to stick with them.  As a woman, you’ve undoubtedly learned who ‘fits small’ and who doesn’t.  

And if you haven’t been living in a cave you’ll also be aware that over the last ten years of so, you know that sizes have been increasing, but while staying the same – which is to say that the size 10 you bought a few years ago is the size 6 you bought recently. 

If you’re like me you don’t weigh yourself very often but instead use your clothes as a gauge of your weight gain or loss and mostly was a decent way to judge.  When things start to feel a little tight it’s time to lighten up a bit.  And this is why I’m currently in a bit of a conundrum about the role the clothing manufacturing industry has in the management of my waist line.

Now realistically, nothing, but somehow that doesn’t sit so well with me.

For some reason I am pretty good at maintaining my weight.  Over the course of my adulthood I’ve pretty much been the same size.  As I’ve mentioned before, my office moved away from the more populated area of the city and in so my habit of running a few errands over the lunch break wasn’t possible anymore.  The reason I mention these facts is that I seem to have added a few pounds over the last year, unwanted ones   However, I have also seemed to have reduced my clothing by a size.

I’m no math wizard, but that does not add up.

Weight is a ‘massive’ issue in North America, one that I’m not going to go into beyond my own experience. And this is where I start to question if it is reprehensible that clothing sizes continue to grow in girth but stay the same in name – giving us all a false sense of the facts.

Recently I tried on pants at a store where I shop in a regular basis.  They manufacture their own brand so the sizing is relatively standard year to year.  But this time, some of the garments I tried on where two sizes smaller.  I had not lost the estimated 20 lbs required for that much of a size difference.  And I was stunned.  So stunned I mentioned it to the store manager.  Fortunately this seemed to be an isolated incident but it still makes me wonder how much the recalibration of sizing affects the weight of North Americans.

In the end there’s probably nothing to be done except maybe uses the scales instead of the waist band to gauge my size.