Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: It’s Just Not Common Sense

I really enjoy reading customer service books and I’ve been through quite a few lately. Since starting in this business eons ago, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how we could do things better. I actually spend a lot of time thinking about how everything could be better, not just service but the design of things as well.

The great thing about books on improving customer service is that those authors think the same way I do. They have made a career of finding things that are wrong when it comes to service of all kinds, and then designing new and innovative ways to fix them.

Confession: The very best and most enjoyable reason is reading about terrible customer service experiences we’ve all had. After having a good time reading them, we can sit back and think about how they could be improved.

The goal for great customer service is to make transactions as easy as possible, or using a word I really like, “frictionless.” The idea is to make things as smooth as possible—no friction. Although the intentions are there, in truth it’s not so much.

Here are some of the latest things that make no sense and drive people crazy (especially me), all while claiming that they are “frictionless.”

1. CAPTCHA: You know what that is, right? Those idiot, stupid, painful “I am not a robot” exercises you have to perform before entering a website. Find the streetlights or the cars in the nine photos. Get rid of those; we don’t need them. However, I finally learned what CAPTCHA is an acronym for. Are you ready? It’s Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Good. Now you know what that most hated of all acronyms stands for.

2. Signing in after I got an email to go to my account. They all do it: LinkedIn, Amazon, Hilton Honors—it does not make a bit of sense. You get an email from LinkedIn on Facebook that says some like, “A lot of people have been looking at your profile, check it out now.” When you hit the link—the link to their website—you have to sign in. Come on, you invited me. You came to my email box and told me to go to my page on your site. Now you want me to sign in? You know who I am, you sent me an email for crying out loud. The worst part, and I swear this is absolutely true on the Hilton Honors site, before I sign in, I have to do that stupid CAPTCHA thing. Really? You came to me, you got to my non-robot human being email, and now I have to prove I am a human. Here’s something you guys can do: Don’t send me emails about going to your page to check out my profile anymore.

3. Ticket kiosks at the airport. These things could be handy and could really cut time if they worked. But most of the time they don’t. There is always something wrong. Even if you conquer all the challenges of getting your boarding pass, you still must stand in line to get rid of your bag. File this under “convenient and money saving for the company, not for you.” It’s actually at your intense inconvenience.

4. The same with self-service checkout stations at the supermarket. These would be great if they worked, but they don’t. They might be fine if you are buying a candy bar or a newspaper but forget doing your entire grocery order. It will not be possible to handle 65 items in a row without a screw-up.

5. How about standing in line ready to board the plane and being behind those people who have the boarding passes in their smartphones? Don’t get me wrong, I think this could be a great idea and contribute to frictionless boarding if it worked. But most of the time it doesn’t. Most of the time we are in line behind one of these proud techies while they spend three minutes passing their phone over the reader every which way they can, trying to get it to read the boarding pass code on their phones. It takes about four times longer than if they had just used the real boarding pass.

6. Here’s a personal favorite: people who believe in computer systems so much that they don’t question them, even when they make no sense. Once again, systems are great when they work and most of the time CRM systems do work. But those rare times when they don’t make sense you have to understand that and use your common sense. I once had an argument with a PCB inside salesperson. I told her it made no sense when she came to me for sign-off on a quote which she had just done using our quoting system. The price of 10 pieces was $100 each but the price of 500 pieces was $250 each, and the price of 750 pieces was $450 each. No matter how much I argued she came back with, “Well that’s what the system says.” No matter how much I tried to convince her that the pricing made no sense, no matter how much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth I did (and it felt like it got to that), she never got it. It was all about what the computer said. Oy vey!

Well, I’ve had my fun, so thanks for humoring me this week. Next week, we’ll get back to more serious stuff.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.