Thursday, April 30, 2009

Pet Peeves about customer support web sites.

The other day I signed up for email bills from my electric company (LIPA).   It's a good thing their business is to deliver power and not sell things over the internet. 

1. The clearly farmed out their customer support web site to Siebel, who's name appears all over the place.   You jump back and forth between domain names to do anything.

2. When you have to enter your account number, you must type it with no spaces or dashes.  On the printed bill, it has dashes.  This is an inexcusable laziness on their part.   You want to allow customers to type something EXACTLY as it is written on the printed form, to reduce the number of support complaints.

3. They don't actually send you the bill as a (PDF) document that you can read and save.   They send you email saying you can read the bill at their site.   This wastes my time, because I certainly am going to use a unique password for their site (*you* don't trust them to not be hacked, do you?) and there is little chance I will remember it from month to month. 

4. Their web site only offers bills in HTML format.  While that is fine to read on line, it is horrible if you want to file it on disk and keep it with your financial records. 

Not that I should single out LIPA for laziness.   They are just one of many companies that don't understand that having a really great* web presence reduces customer support costs.

*great does not mean flash animation.  It means simple, clear pages, that ADA accessible and provide information in a variety of ways, so the customer can decide how to use it.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Please start teaching daily arithmetic in schools again.

At the supermarket yesterday, the cashier had forgot to give the one cent change to the man ahead of me. She had started to ring me up by the time he mentioned it. As she looked around, flustered, trying to figure out how to open the cash drawer without messing things up, I offered to give the man a penny now, and she could then give me one when the drawer opened at the end of my transaction. Everyone seemed happy with that. I gave the man a penny and he went on his wayl

When my items were complete, she said "$26.14".
Me: "OK, but it's really $26.13 because of the penny". I counted out $26.13 and gave it to her.
Cashier: "Can I do that? I still have to give you back the penny." She looked horribly confused by this transaction. She was sort of standing frozen, looking at the money.
Me: "Wait. Here's the extra cent, now it's $26.14". I handed her the penny.
Cashier: "Oh, OK". Puts the money in the drawer, pulls a penny back out and hands it to me. "Thank you."
Me: "You're welcome."

I'm still am wondering how she can even work the cash register.