Frustration unlimited – Customer (dis) service on the Net.
If you have time on your hands and are looking to get really frustrated, let me tell you something you can do: you can try using the online payment pages of our telecom service providers or the internet banking facilities of our major banks. This morning, I tried paying broadband charges for a connection. To log on, in addition to your user-ID and password, you need to know which “domain” you are on. You click on the drop-down and you get a humongous list starting from , to . Now, why should I, the customer, have to find a “domain”? Why can’t I just key in an email ID that I know and let the system figure it out? I chuckle at this, figure out my domain, click OK and move on. I choose to pay my bill by credit card, after a pop-up that rounds off my payment to the nearest Rupees, I’m taken to a Bank payment gateway where I put in my credit card information. After a couple of screens that unnecessarily repeat the information that I keyed in, I finally click an OK button to process payment, hoping this is all done. My irritation wasn’t to end that quickly, though. To make the payment I used an ICICI credit card that is now “secured” via 3dsecure, an additional security measure that needs a couple of other screens. The provider’s mechanism, though, can’t deal with the additional redirection and freezes. Now I’m back to the first screen where I have to log in (by selecting the domain 
) again. This time, I use a different credit card that I’ve not enabled 3dsecure on and the gateway seems to work with that. I now get to the well-loved Citibank screen where I need to key in the associated debit card number and click through an HPIN using that weird image-based keyboard (another case of programmer-itis winning over customer ease of use, I think). But finally I make it. I’m happy to see the “Your payment has been made successfully” message. But guess what? Because the payment was automatically rounded off to a lower number (and I couldn’t change that), my connection was left in an Unpaid state – for a sum of Rs. 0.35! You may not believe this, but actually logged in again and paid Re. 1.00, on my second card, to get this going.
As a product vendor in this market-place, I am both frustrated and happy. Frustrated that it takes so much effort and time to make a simple payment, but extremely happy that we don’t have problems like this in Impel. Don’t get me wrong, we do have the occasional bugs and performance does get affected when thousands of users are banging away on Impel . But for the most part, I am happy to say that we have looked at things completely from a customer perspective in Impel.
Do share your tales of happiness and woe with software – even if it is ours!
