My girlfriend and I booked a trip to a sunny beach vacation paradise for next month. This morning, I got an email from the company through which we booked it, telling us we needed to download eDocuments, provided us with a link, and instructions to download them.

So I clicked the link in my usual browser (Chrome), entered the information, and got to a screen with code in the header and footer informing there was missing information. “Invalid Email” I believe was the exact phrase. But I soldiered on and clicked the little eDoc icon, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And nothing. After a call to the company, and trying to communicate with a guy who was having a great deal of trouble understanding me, he was telling me to just click on the icon and wait and wait wait until it goes through. I got off the phone with him and opened up Internet Explorer for the first time ever, went to the website, entered the information, logged in, clicked the little icon and guess what? It worked!

Really? Here’s no fewer than 4 things that are wrong with this customer experience.

1) You want people to have the documents, send them instead of making them fetch it themselves. Not everyone is as tech savvy as me, and the process of logging in to retriveve documents can be intimidating to people like my mother. The fact that the link looks like it’s part of a broken website (Invalid Email), etc… plummets the level of confidence in the process down further.

2) Nothing wrong with putting your call center offshore. Nothing wrong with an onshore call center staffed by new immigrants or people whose first language is not English, but why would you staff your call center with people whose  whose grasp of the language they are hired to conduct their job in is tenuous enough that it makes communication difficult? It doesn’t make any sense that you would have them working in a call center if they cannot handle a call.

3) Internet Explorer? Your little adventure you want us to go on requires us to use an outdated browser? (Follow that link and you will see quantitative evidence to support the term ‘outdated’. I’ve also take then liberty of making a pretty picture)

4) The fact all this, I had to figure out on my own. I am a project manager by trade so it’s in my nature not to let things go and to figure things out until they work I want. Not everyone has this characteristic (and Thank God, because that would be booooooring). Lots of people would just log in, it wouldn’t work, they’d say “To heck with it!” and then when they get to the airport or hotel, start getting grief because they didn’t have the documents the travel agent insisted they retrieve themselves, but not let them retrieve it.

All in all- Sunquest- we are looking forward to the vacation, but you really have to get it together.

Now if anyone needs me I’ll be getting faced on Mojitos on the beach.

Fear not! A blog post about inspiring creativity and accommodating the creative process in projects is in the works!