Coles Puts Customers Last

For ages now, all the Coles supermarkets I use have had a nice simple EFT setup. While the cashier is scanning your purchases, you could swipe your loyalty card if you had one and you could swipe your credit/debit card and select your account. At the end, you could quickly enter your PIN, wait a few seconds for the receipt to be printed and be on your way.

Today, the local Coles introduced a new "improved" system that finally took into account the chip on your debit/credit card. And, at the same time removed the little bit of streamlining that everybody has become accustomed to. You can no longer do anything with the card reader until the cashier has finished, and you can't swipe your loyalty card at all—that difficult task is now reserved to the cashier. So you wait, then you insert your card, then you wait until the machine is ready, then you select your account and wait a bit more. Finally, you get to enter your PIN. This all adds a noticeable delay to the checkout process.

Coles, it's not an improvement at all and there's just no excuse for it.

Foursquare Privacy Fail

I've been seeing a number of friends take up with foursquare and I've seen quite a few mentions of their service in the blogs, so yesterday I thought I'd have a look at it and signed up. Bad timing. They chose to get embroiled in a story of a privacy policy that describes something quite different from what they deliver.

That's not the bad part. All of us make mistakes. Rapidly-growing startups probably make more than most. I like it better when people don't make mistakes, but I can live with it—unless it's a matter of life and death. And I can live with the mistakes if the same people don't make a point of repeating the same mistakes all the time.

The thing I can't abide is people and businesses who make mistakes and refuse to admit them or try to conceal the mistakes from the affected people. A recent story in Wired claims that Foursquare Puts Money Before Privacy and backs that up with plenty of data. Read it.

I'm getting sick of companies that don't even pretend to care about their customers and my policy has hardened in past few months. I had already cancelled my Facebook account because of their behaviour—not that you can cancel with them. They just treat you as if you're having a little time out and maintain your account regardless. Major fail. I'm not planning to do anything with foursquare now.

Constant Improvements

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a customer service failure at FooBar Motors. I did not identify the company because they generally do a pretty good job of looking after their customers and that's why I keep buying cars from them and why I keep getting those cars serviced by them. The thing I was getting at is that, even when the culture is to provide great service, it's not always easy to get all the details right.

That brings me to my domain—software. We creators of software probably make more painful hoops for our customers to jump through than even the worst car dealership. And, in some ways, we have much less of an excuse: software is infinitely malleable, so we just have to fix it when it's hard to use. But we don't always know that it's hard to use. When we test it, we're kind to it and treat it the way we meant it to be treated. When it resists us, we understand it well enough to gently persuade it to go where we want. When it tells us lies, we don't feel too concerned because we understand why it lied. Besides, it's our baby and we don't like to be told that our baby is ugly, so we resort to that ever-reliable solution—denial.

And of course software is difficult to test. There are so many ways to get where you think you want to go that it's almost certain that a user will find pathways that we neither intended nor perhaps even noticed and which we certainly did not get right. Lots of people have written papers and books and given presentations about the business of software testing and I'm not going to try to push any particular approach on you today. But I think it's really important for all of us who create software to recognize that we are far from getting the testing right and that it's something that we must pay better attention to in the future.

What's Wrong Here?

Recently, I needed to contact the service department of a local car dealer. Knowing that I could instantly put my hand on the previous service invoice from them, I grabbed it and saw a little box that said "BrandA service" with a phone number. I rang the number.

It rang for quite some time and was eventually answered by a receptionist who said, "Good morning, FooBar Motors, how can I help you?" I asked for the BrandA service department. She said, rather impatiently, "Which dealership?" Not expecting that question, having got the number from that dealership's invoice, I hesitated a moment. She then said, "SuburbM, or SuburbN, or SuburbO, or SuburbP?" So I said I wanted SuburbM and went through the wait for the next receptionist to answer.

Again, I heard, "Good morning, FooBar Motors, how can I help you?" I was on top of things now, so I said I wanted the SuburbM service department for BrandA and quietly congratulated myself on having short-circuited at least one step in the process. The next receptionist who answered said, "Good morning, FooBar Motors, how can I help?" I imagined I was talking to the right person now, so started to ask my real question. She interrupted and said, "Are you after the service department?" I admitted I was, and waited once more for the next receptionist in the stack to answer.

FooBar Motors have many signs posted up in the local premises talking about how seriously they take the issue of providing great customer service and, as a matter of fact, the people who you meet face to face there are polite and helpful. But the pain of ringing them is really a bit much.