In my last Blog post I talked about a bad digital experience with my energy supplier. Simply delivering a digital customer experience does not make for a better business or a more satisfied (or lower cost) customer, it has to be the right digital customer experience, and there are plenty of examples of where companies simply do not get it…
My French bank account has extreme password and sign in security, it’s so tight you can only use random numbers and characters . These are impossible to remember so you have to write them down, thus making it less secure. And then inside the system they have an encrypted messaging system, delivering secure access to the bank for the odd question and answer. BUT if you actually want to do anything like for example, update your phone number, they will not accept it from their own secure system but rather you have to write to them snail mail in an old fashioned signed letter. Of course you can’t find an address of where to write to on their web site, and anyone can write the letter telling them anything. They have zero idea who sent it but as long as it’s signed you’re good.
Now TV is an on demand pay-per-view channel in the UK. They offer a weekly subscription model and I think a lot of people would be willing to use the service if only they could turn it off as easily as switching it on. Instead of an easy on/off toggle it is literally impossible to turn the service off without watching 4 or 5 YouTube videos on how to do so, and in fact even then as I write this I have still not managed it. Mind you I did binge watch ‘Chernobyl’ which was good, but I literally have no idea where the bill is or how to un-subscribe. As a result, once I do figure it out I will never switch it on again, complete business lunacy, as their revenues would shoot up if I actually had control.
Apple’s iCloud works amazingly easily, but for any decent amount of storage above the entry level, you have to pay them. Realising I had a massive 2TB of cloud storage available from my broadband provider and included “free” in my monthly broadband charge I thought that I would use that. Technical problem after technical problem later (3 months later!) it is finally set up. But can I actually use it? Can I get my photos - all 22,000 of them - to upload to the cloud? Absolutely no way, it’s utterly impossible and that’s after a long call to the service provider. The usability has clearly never been tested and it’s truly useless if you can’t figure it out. As a result I will revert to the Apple which works like a dream and is therefore probably worth the extra money.
In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) will apparently ruin the country’s economy according to the President of the United States. Digitisation is mooted as a great way to reduce costs (as it should be). But if you download the NHS app, the very first thing it asks you for is your post (zip) code and once entered, it tells me that there are no doctors surgeries anywhere near me – despite the fact that I can see one out of my kitchen window and walk there in 2 minutes. Thereafter, the app crashes and refuses to go any further. Again absolutely no one can have tested this for usability and money is being wasted rather than saved.
Frustration at poor digital customer service is just as bad as it ever was. The good old-fashioned poor customer service, when the experience sucks the business does not save money in fact it probably increases costs. Then they wonder why the business case has not been realised and the customers still write Blogs about how bad everything is! There really is no need for this at all, just think customer first for the customer journeys, don’t get trapped into back end thinking and processes and IT centric nonsense. Get the customer journey and the customer experience right and your digital customer engagement will delight.
