I was considering buying a laptop and called the Dell helpline to ask a few questions. I was put through to a “Sales Account Manager”. He answered all my questions well and was quite helpful, but insisted that I place an order on that very call. I said I wanted to consider other options and would get back to him. So he requested me not to call the helpline again, but to call him directly so that the sale would be through him. He sent me his mobile number on SMS. The next day he called me to check if I had decided. The day after that I had five missed calls from him. I called him and told him not to call me. I’d call him and place the order when I made up my mind. Which I did last thursday. The payment, order and address confirmation went smoothly and I was quite pleased with the simplicity of the whole process. I was promised that I would get the notebook in courier by Tuesday, February 23rd, or latest by February 24th.

My current notebook is not brink of dying with only half the screen working, the other half blank. I was quite anxious to get the new one. I was provided a Blue Dart tracking number to check on the status of my shipment. On Tuesday (the due date) I checked online and was shocked to see that the destination was mentioned as Mumbai and the estimated delivery date was March 1. I immediately tried calling Varun (Sales Account Manager) whom I had placed the order with. No response. A few rings and he would disconnect my call. I called about ten times and finally wrote an email asking him to call me ASAP. No response.

Today morning, I spent 2 hours calling the Dell helpline. I spoke to about 12 different people. Narrated my problem and gave my order number to each one of them. Each one would transfer my call to the “relevant people” and then I would be on hold for about 5 minutes listening a female voice advertising their “premium care package” and monitors. Even when I specifically requested them not to transfer my call, they would. “All our customer care representatives are busy”, I heard that about 50 times today morning. If I chose the “Buy a new computer” option on the IVRS, I was immediately connected to a “real person”, but soon lost his interest when I told him I had a problem with an order I had already placed.

Finally, I called up BlueDart to see if I could get some clarity on what was happening. My phone was picked up on the second ring by a very helpful, live human being. He took my details and within 2 minutes told me what the problem was. Despite my giving the address in writing, Dell had screwed up and given them the wrong pincode. This pincode was apparently out of BlueDart’s “Service Area” and therefore they brought the parcel to Mumbai from Chennai and were going to arrange for a special delivery to that pincode, which would take an additional 3 days from the date promised to me by Dell. I told him that my address was 2 km away from BlueDart’s Goa HQ and there was no way it was “out of service area”. He quickly corrected the pincode but said my parcel would still arrive three days later because it was being held at Bhiwandi for the ’special delivery’.

All this, without a single person from Dell being helpful. All of the ten people I spoke to sounded like they were doing me a favor by listening to my problem. The only helpful people at Dell seemed to be the sales people who expected you to place an order. Once you place your order, you are on your own.

While it is understandable that mistakes happen, a company that does not move quickly to acknowledge and correct it, is going to leave the customer with a terrible experience. In this case, ”my Dell representative” simply ignored my calls and no one else in their customer care department was any help.  I had to myself correct Dell’s mistake with BlueDart and make sure I got the notebook. If I hadn’t done this myself, I wonder when Dell would have woken up to the fact that they had shipped to the wrong address.

Ofcourse, Dell is by no means an exception. There are companies in every industry who offer the most shabby after-sales experience and have a unresponsive, irritating and useless customer care operation. However, in my experience, Dell topped every other “bad experience” I’ve had. It was like they were behind a screen and there was no way to reach anyone who could help.

It is shocking how  companies will spend millions on advertising and marketing, but won’t fix these simple problems. None of the problems arising out of this experience are difficult or expensive to fix. But I am quite sure if I order a laptop from Dell next year, I could have the same experience. Ofcourse, I won’t order from Dell again.

With experiences like this, Dell still has the cheek to say “Yours is here”.

When a customer walks into the branch and goes to the teller to deposit a cheque, he is given a cryptic answer and sent to fill the deposit slip. Once filled, he is given clues to find the drop-box. This leads him to different areas of the branch and creates oppotunities for interaction with more bank employees in his quest to find the drop-box. Finally, he finds it hidden behind a desk on the first floor, reaching there only after crossing the deadly dungeon (narrow spiral staircase).

Ok, so its not a game. Just another example of how customer experience doesn’t figure in most descisions at service companies. But this is taking it too far! You don’t need a service designer to tell you that something as commonly used as a cheque drop-box should be in an open area, preferably close to the entrance and definitely with signage.

But then again, may be you do!

At Guts, we do a ‘Service Audit’ to pin-point these kind of situations. The Service Audit involves experiencing a company’s service through all possible touch-points and in every possible situation. This really helps find the pain areas in the company’s service delivery and a customer’s experience. In many instances (like the one described above), operational expediency overrides any consideration for customer experience. Setting this right is not difficult or expensive once you look at it through a ’service design’ lens.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

[Seen at BoingBoing.net]

Most of the examples are funny and striking, but some are weak examples of ‘broken-ness’. I’d like to take an example to illustrate how we sometimes look for someone else’s “mistakes” to prove our point. But these ‘mistakes’ are in a context which needs to be understood.

Seth Godin shows the photograph of a pharmacy pill bottle meant for a dog. Apart from saying “DOG” in brackets after the name of the patient, the label has instructions like “alcohol may intensify the effects of this drug” and “use care while operating a car”

Yes, its funny that a bottle of pills for a dog has these messages. But, the reason why this is broken is not because of these messages (as Godin points out). The labels are pre-printed with these messages. So it is out of the pharmacist’s control to remove these irrelevant messages from a bottle of dog pills.

From a user experience point of view, this is broken because the pills are given in the same shape and size of bottles that are used for human prescriptions. Chances are that an old couple with dozens of prescription bottles might mix up pills and take the ones intended for their dog. An easy way to fix this is to put all prescriptions for animals in a bottle of a size and shape distinct from the normal bottles. This clearly indicates who the pills are meant for. And with a different bottle, a new label without the ‘funny messages’ might be in order.

I also discovered an interesting but now defunct blog called “This is Broken”. It has dozens of examples of services and products that are ‘designed’ badly.

The food court at Oberoi Mall (Goregaon, Mumbai) provides a glaring case study. It has a dozen+ outlets spread across an area of around of 4000 sqm. But none of the them accept payments. A diner has to calculate how much the family’s order will cost, go to a seperate counter, buy a ‘Spoon Card’, add balance to the card equivalant to the estimated bill and return with the card to food outlet to place an order.

I asked around and found that they moved to this system recently because the food outlets had a shortage of change and it was becoming difficult for each outlet to manage cash.

Oh great! So to make it easier for the people who man the food outlets, they make the customer’s life difficult. To do away with a billing system and save the hassle of keeping change, they came up with the brilliant idea of centralized billing. Only, they did not think about how this impacts the customer experience.

Service Map of a Customer’s Experience at the Spoon Food Court

Click here to see how this centralized billing stystem impacts the customer experience. It adds 8 steps and 30 minutes to a simple transaction of ordering food.   

This is not only terrible from a customer experience point of view, but is also a messy and inefficient service delivery process and a bad retail strategy.

1. Waste of Space: They’ve wasted valuable retail space creating a seperate counter for issuing the Spoon card.
2. Complex and Expensive Technology: The Issuing card counter has 2 POS terminals which are used to charge a Spoon card with the value that a customer required. Every food outlet has a POS terminal to swipe the card, take-off the value of the bill from the card and punch in the order. All of these would be networked and would require a software platform for clearing every transaction.
3. Discourages Impulse purchase: What if I’ve gone through the entire process of getting a Spoon card and just before I place the order, I also feel like ordering a lassi? The entire process is so cumbersome that I’d rather not have the lassi (which means it would be really really cumbersome!)
4. Prevents small orders: What if I’m just passing by and want to have a coke before I head to the gaming zone next door? Will I go through the entire process of standing in a line and acquiring a Spoon card to get a coke? No chance. This prevents customers with small 1-2 item orders from coming to the food zone.  
5. Creates huge lines and chaos: 2 cash counters to serve customers from a dozen+ food outlets. Is this a joke? A Subway that I frequent at another mall has 2 cash counters within it and still makes me wait to pay. How do they expect to provide customer speedy billing and payments with such inadequate capacity? Lines longer than 5 people turn people off and make them reconsider making the purchase.

All this just because its difficult to manage billing and keep change? (something that is such an integral part of any retail business). And if that was a genuine problem, there are other, simpler ways to solve it. If keeping change is a problem, the food outlets could address it by:

• Keeping the pricing change-friendly. Just price everything in multiples of 5 or 10 (50, 90, 120 or even 55, 95, 15). This reduces the denominations of change you need to just 4 (100s, 50s, 10s and may be 5s)
• Get Change. Get together and employ a person whose sole job is to make sure every food outlet has change. Every morning he’ll go to a bank and get change worth a fixed amount and distribute it among the outlets. He also makes sure that during the day every outlet has a healthy inventory of change. At a monthly salary of Rs.6,000 this would be about fifty times cheaper than the complex system in place right now.

“We are surrounded by engineers’ folly: too many technical solutions still looking for problems to solve”
David Tansley

<< FOLLOW-UP CONVERSATION >>

Saurabh Nanda:

They’ve copied the concept but changed it to make it worse.
I went to a food court in MBK Mall, Bangkok. I was given a similar card at the entry *pre-filled* with 2,000 Thai Baht (per person). I could swipe the card at all the food outlets and after I’ve had my meal, on my way out, I had to pay whatever I had used up on the card
There are advantages to this model:
1. If the food court owner and the outlets are on a revenue sharing arrangement then the cash counter can be managed by the owner. He/she will always know each outlets revenue.
2. All the outlets do not need to have cash counters & credit card machines. All of it is centralized.
3. The customer is paying through plastic, so there is always a chance of more purchases.
4. The customer does not have to fork out cash up-front.

Abhisek Sarda:

This system could work as an add-on but can’t be the only payment option. Some people might even be comfortable putting Rs.2000 on the card and using it across 6 months. But what if I am not a regular visitor? There needs to be a cash payment option.
Also, as a tourist the 2000 baht card might appeal to you. But if you are meeting a friend for coffee, would you want to go through the entire process? It just adds steps to a simple transaction.
The cost benefit isn’t that much, because all food outlets have a POS terminal anyway to swipe the Spoon card. Credit/Debit card machines are supplied by banks for free to all outlets.
Also, when you are catering to a very diverse audience, you need to make a system inclusive towards different attitudes to money.

Saurabh Nanda:

Aren’t your arguments applicable to token based food outlets as well? You first by a token/coupon from the cash counter and then you go the chaat stall to get your snacks. Spoon is not much different then. I’m sure there are some advantages in these systems that they are so prevalent.

Abhisek Sarda:

Yes, the problems of centralized billing are common to all formats of the system. However, a Haldiram outlet is much, much smaller, has fewer food counters and the owner has an over-ridding compulsion to centralize billing to check cheating by employees and also free-up the bhelpuri wala to make bhel-puri. At the mall, most outlets have a dedicated person to man the POS terminal anyway.
There are some obvious advantages (tracking sales to share revenues…) but is that good enough to screw up the customer experience? Probably not. There are simpler ways to track sales without inconviniencing the customer.