* Is interacting with your Web site as good as in the real world?
This week I’m traveling and I’m on the road in New York. It is raining, the hotel’s Internet service is down, and I have a sinus infection. Otherwise, it’s all good.
Today, I want to discuss a problem that plagues many Web applications: Not communicating effectively with the customer when error conditions occur.
Say you pull into a gas station in the real world and fill up and the cashier offers you a discounted car wash. “Good idea” you think. You say “yes” and you are handed a token. You drive around to the car wash and present your token at which point the attendant responds in Russian but doesn’t wash your car.
You can easily figure out that you are not going to get any sense out of the attendant so you go back to the cashier and are told to try again. Like a good little consumer you go back and try again and the same thing happens.
In the real world, you would go back to the cashier and expect that rather than telling you to try again they’d do something new.
Well, Web sites don’t usually work that way. The Web site that made me think about this belongs to United Airlines and what got everything going was a message I received on Sunday, the day before my flight.
The message, which arrived at 9 a.m., was an invitation from United to check-in online. I hit the link in the message and found that I couldn’t check-in. After head scratching and retrying I discovered the reason: Pre-checking-in can only be done as far out as 24 hours before a flight.
As I had received the message at 9 a.m. and clicked through at 9:02 a.m. for a flight due to leave at 9:25 a.m. the next day, I was obviously out of luck.
Now this wasn’t the end of the world but it was annoying. If United had sent the message at 9:25 a.m. I would have been happy but no, United sent it a random amount of time ahead and then on the landing page did not bothered to show a clear warning such as “You can check into this flight in 23 minutes.”
So I waited until 9:30 a.m. and tried again. This time I went through the process fine up to the point where the site asked me: “Would you like to purchase a seat in Economy Plus?”
It went on to pitch me with: “Economy Plus offers more personal space and comfort with up to five more inches of legroom, as well as earlier boarding and deplaning.”
As I am tall and prefer to arrive at my destination not looking like I am crippled this seemed a good idea. I clicked on the big yellow arrow labeled “Accept Offer” and was rewarded with the rather cryptic message: “Invalid path /webcheckin/upsell/upSellAcceptOffer was requested.”
Darn. They must have a bug.
I hit “back” and tried again. Same thing. Called United Customer Service. They said that they didn’t handle Web stuff and that I’d have to call the Web Support people (of course, they couldn’t just transfer me).
Web Support is apparently based in Mumbai and after one of those labyrinthine conversations you often have with outsourced customer service reps where the CSR confirms every damn thing you say, I was told that the message means that no Economy Plus seats are available.
From this I conclude that some programmer at United came up with the highly cost effective idea that when Economy Plus seats are unavailable they should just delete the application, rename it, or something similar.
What is sad is that both of these examples of poorly thought communications are from the same company and show that there is a significant disparity between the intention of its Web-based services and its real world business processes.
In the real world, a CSR, no matter where they were based, would have told me that upgrades weren’t available. There would have been no doubt in the minds of the CSR or the people who write the brain-dead telephone scripts for outsourced CSRs that a sensible response would be to tell the customer they can’t upgrade rather than keep offering the possibility.
Web applications must, if you are to keep your customers even vaguely happy, respond sensibly to changing conditions and not just fail!
The difference between the good, the bad and the ugly is just about making sure that what you do online is as good as it is in the real world.
