Please just take my money!
Everywhere you look at the moment people are talking about usability – making tasks easier for your users and/or clients. Whether people contact you by phone, internet or visit you directly, they want to do things in the easiest and fastest way possible.
Keeping this in mind, I am still reeling from an experience that I had with one of our suppliers this week. For an unknown reason we had an outstanding invoice so I contacted them by telephone to make a payment.
Problem #1
Billing enquiries has very cleverly been included as part of the technical support option in their automated telephone system. This meant that I was cuing with other customers who had technical problems and were going to take a lot longer than me.
Problem #2
After providing my customer reference number and explaining why I had called I was asked to provide my password. Not realizing that I would require a password to pay an invoice I had no idea what it was. The fact that I wanted to pay the company money was apparently not a good enough reason to bypass this ‘security question’. No password – no go!!
After being told that our password would be emailed to us I was to hang up and call back later.
Seriously guys…….
I may not have mentioned the name of the company here but let me tell you….in the last 2 days I have told roughly 8 people about my BAD experience.
So what am I trying to say?
Ensure that your customers can complete the tasks they need to complete quickly and efficiently! If you cannot do this you may be saying goodbye to them along with all of the potential customers who have heard the bad story.
