The Black Liszt

Category: Customer Service

Adventures with Health System Software: Customer Feedback

If you want a cheap laugh, go to the Mount Sinai medical system website and hope they ask you to complete an opinion survey. It’s stupid and ridiculous, deserving lots of snark. But try not to think about what it means or the underlying reality, or you might get kinda depressed. Like I did, because I went to the website because I needed to get something done! I needed a phone number. Sounds simple, right? Until you understand I had already talked with someone at Mount Sinai, and that person gave me the wrong number. But I really needed the number — I needed to make an appointment for a medical test that is crucial to my health. After a great deal of searching, I finally found what appeared to be the right number. Except it wasn't, as I found when I called.

This was part of my epic struggle to schedule an appointment — something that I do with a couple clicks for my favorite restaurants, my cat at the animal hospital, or … yes, my primary care provider. But at that powerhouse medical institution, Mount Sinai? Only the best people who really, really, really want an appointment are graciously granted one. See this for the story.

In this post, I'll confine myself to glancing at the carefully constructed Mount Sinai website and the extraordinary steps they are taking to assure that it is the best it can be. It's clear they're in a race for the top with the health insurance companies on this subject, see this.

Major companies that build websites have a problem, a problem they share with lots of companies that build software. The executives in charge are required to say that they care about quality, and do everything in their power to track and improve it, along with important metrics involving customer satisfaction. They take concrete steps to measure quality, using the best firms out there to help them.

There's just a little problem: they can't get it done.

The Mount Sinai website

I recently encountered a typical example of hopeless executive incompetence while trying to get a simple phone number to schedule a visit to Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC – scheduling that any institution whose software had successfully made the wrenching transition to the 2,000’s would have made long ago. I tell the story of the scheduling adventure here.

It was a long slog to get my MRI appointment made, including a number of calls and emails. You might think that when a window popped up near the end of my ultimately unsuccessful trek through the Mount Sinai website to extract a simple phone number that I would ignore it. After all, the website is a carefully-crafted, attractive-looking piece of useless fluff, impressive perhaps to the important people who are shown images of it in a Powerpoint presentation during some meeting, but in fact annoying, error-filled and generally useless to real people. Silly me: here I am thinking that the hoi-polloi, the real people who have health issues, are the relevant people here – when in reality, it’s the executives, jockeying for ever-growing power, prestige and money among themselves.

If you’ve read any of my other posts on software quality, you may suspect that I’m a glutton for punishment. Your suspicions are correct. So I agreed to take the survey. When I left the site, I expected the survey to pop up, but it didn’t. After all, the request told me, in no uncertain terms, “it will pop up when you leave the site.” OK, I thought, your loss, not mine. But darn! The survey I recently got from my health insurance company was so juicy!! I would have loved to see who wins the race for most dysfunctional survey between a major provider and a major payer!

It turns out, I just needed to wait. Before long, the survey arrived in an email:

I was a bit surprised to get the request in this way, but OK, they’ve obviously got all my information, so fine. As usual, I hover over the link to make sure it’s legit. The URL was portal.gsight.net with some codes after. I quickly discovered this was a domain owned by the company that sent me the email, Greystone.net. Hmmm, who are they?

Wow, a whole company devoted to healthcare marketing and the internet! They must be really good! I wonder if they know about the web?

It appears they know about the Web. And look at this:

It’s a whole process to make the website great! Smart folks, those people at Mount Sinai, turning to professional specialists to figure out how well their website is serving their customers! Though I can only assume that Greystone has only recently been engaged, since the Mount Sinai website is, after all, a pretty-looking pile of stinking crap…

So let’s dig into this expert opinion survey. Click. Here’s where I land:

OMG!!! My jaw has hit the floor so heavily, I’ll probably be scarred for life. I wonder if I can sue Greystone to cover the costs of plastic surgery for my deformed, floor-mangled jaw??

Why is my jaw hurting? Because the link these consummate professionals sent me was to a completely generic landing page! There is this thing known as “deep linking,” in which the custom URL you click brings you right to the place in question. It’s widely used. The landing page knows who you are and why you’re there. I guess the folks at Greystone hired a bunch of interns for this project, ones who hadn’t gotten to that chapter in the “Internet Linking for Dummies” book. And no one with the slightest bit of experience, like the average internet user, had tried it out.

After I gave the right answer, I was thrown into a completely generic survey about the website, utterly uninformed about who I was or any smidgen of knowledge about my site visit – putting the lie to the user tracking they supposedly do. Had they done elementary user tracking, they would have known who I was and which pages of the site I had visited. But no, they decided to ask completely generic questions.

Is this hard to do? Nope. For example, my bank, USAA, notices when I go to the “wire transfer” section of their website and then call them. A recorded voice says something like “I see you’ve recently visited the money transfer section of the USAA website; would you like to wire money today, David?” If I answer “yes,” they transfer me to the relevant department. Not hard! Maybe the Greystone.net interns will eventually get to that chapter.

The survey itself was endless, irrelevant awfulness.

Here’s an example of why the survey was awful:

If they had tracked me and made the survey specific, they would have known that I hadn’t filled out a form. Instead, they present me with a question about form-filling, and then require an answer. Most of the questions were like this. By the way, this question was about … the twentieth question — all of them response is required. See the progress bar that says 25%? At some point, it jumped to that, and then, question after question, it didn't changed.

Then at the end, I was invited to give some input. Which I did in calm language, mentioning that it might be nice if the phone numbers on the site were, you know, correct numbers. Of course, since they hadn't deep-linked, they had no way of contacting me to get further information.

Just to be sure I wasn't completely nuts, I went onto the Mount Sinai website again. I got lucky — an invitation to complete an opinion survey popped up again. I carefully chose "take it after leaving the site," and this time it worked, though in a remarkably clunky way, indicating that whoever built the code had flunked Javascript 1.01. So I get the survey, and was blown away by seeing the very same "how did you get here" question I got from the email link. Any competent web programmer could know how I got there, by looking at exactly how the original URL was invoked. Clearly, performing this elementary task was beyond the collective genius of Greystone and Mount Sinai.

Then as I went farther into the brain-dead survey, I discovered that it just didn't work. Look at this:

Look at the percent completion bar just below the black line under the Mt Sinai logo — it's still at zero, even though I'm many questions into it, as you can see by the scroll bar on the right. Programming and QA 1.01. Fail. And of course, it was a survey designed so that no normal person would march all the way through to completion.

Discussion

There’s a concept in math and computing, and also in real life, called “recursion,” or sometimes self-reference. It’s a simple concept; it’s been around for literally thousands of years, as we know from fun statements ancient Greeks made involving lying Cretans. In this case, it applies to the question of the quality checkers: who checks the quality of the quality checkers?

The answer is evidently “no one.” The most basic principles in surveys, common sense but also proven by experience, are “keep it short” and “Make every question matter.” We know these are the relevant principles because everyone who hasn’t failed the “survey 1.01” course knows that the most important metric to measure is drop-out rate. Of the people you invite, how many accept? Of those who accept, how far in the survey do they get before dropping out? What’s the completion rate? Any tracking along these lines would have shown minuscule completion rates. I’d love to have a recording of the executive meeting at Mount Sinai in which the survey results were presented, to see whether the issue was even raised.

But beyond that, let me ask: when was the last time you got a survey from Google? Or Amazon? Never, right? Another thing: have you read even a little bit about opinion polling, about how it's long-since been proven that people give one answer when asked, but then act differently? What people who are moderately educated web professionals know is that surveys are useless! That's why folks who know a little about websites watch what you do! If there's a lot of information on the site, they make it search-based, with lots of suggestions. They look for drop-outs.

Yes, I've made fun of how badly the survey was constructed and executed. It was the electronic equivalent of a paper survey from 50 years ago. Which makes sense, because the Mount Sinai website is the electronic equivalent of a glossy brochure from 50 years ago. That's the killer observation. Mount Sinai could make a huge advance by leaping forward to the state of the art of roughly 20 years ago. The very fact that they're using obsolete technology like surveys — and on top of it doing it incompetently — shows that they are clueless. It's the equivalent of using a steam-powered car instead of an oil-powered one, and being unable to run the steam-powered car competently. The right response here isn't build a better survey — it's use modern customer feedback techniques.

Conclusion

Well, it’s a wash. The hospital system opinion survey was pretty different from the health insurance one, but they each exemplified unique ways of being bad. I wonder how many dimensions of badness there are? The institutions I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing are clearly on the leaderboard of those most likely to get to the maximum. Neither of them has a clue about decades-old methods that are vastly superior for getting customer feedback than surveys, however well-constructed those surveys might be.

Postscript

Learning about the excellent survey work conducted by Greystone.net on behalf of Mount Sinai had an added dimension of amusement for me because I grew up near an institution named Greystone. Or more formally, Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.

It was, as my mother the R.N. called it when I was growing up, a ‘Looney bin.” If someone said something she thought was dumb, she would say “Did you just escape from Greystone?”

May 28, 2019
Adventures with Health Insurance Software: Customer Feedback

I got an email from my health insurance company, telling me I had an important message I could read if I clicked and got to their website. Here's what happened. While I was on the site, I discovered they were delivering break-through functionality making it easier to pay those annoying doctor bills that appear in the mail long after the visit. Here's the scoop. This post tells what happened next.

One of the best things Anthem did to enhance their customer website experience is to be humble. So many stuck-up website creators are sure they’ve done the best job that can be done, and simply put the site out there. Here it is, visitors, we’re sure you’ll agree that it’s a truly excellent website!

The experienced professionals at Anthem are well past this kind of immature attitude. They worry that the site they’ve build isn’t as good as it could be; how better to find this out than by asking the customers, the actual people who use the site?

Certain modern website designers get this kind of information in a sneaky, underhanded way. They closely monitor each click and keystroke made by visitors, and track the time between each. This method of surreptitious shadowing enables them to discern exactly when and where visitors get stuck, bogged down, get lost or whatever. That way they can enhance the site and run experiments to make everyone’s experience smoother – without telling anyone what they’re doing!

It’s amazing the public puts up with this kind of spy-movie tactics! The folks at Anthem aren’t about to be sneaky or underhanded in any way. They’re committed to open, fair and above-board methods. I experienced this myself. When I was in the middle of experiencing their amazing new billing features, I was presented with this screen:

It’s an offer to give feedback, via a third-party tool. Excellent! I think I’ll say yes, and give them my feedback.

I proceeded to experience the fullness of the new, break-through patient billing feature I’ve described here. Then, when I left the site, sure enough, I had my opportunity to provide feedback. I dove in and first saw this screen with a couple questions to which they “require” the answers.

What’s that about? This is voluntary, remember? I’m helping you guys. You should be glad to get any feedback I care to give. And I’m not starting out in a great mood because the first couple questions are completely generic.

So please forgive me, but I zoomed ahead, getting to here

Question 23! Sorry, I wasn’t able to get it done. I zoom to what looks like the end:

Getting personal with the income, are we? After a whole pile of b.s. questions. I’m outa here. But then this appears:

Yup, 26 questions. ALL OF THEM “REQUIRED.”

I wonder if anyone tracks the completion rate of these surveys. I suspect not.

I bet Anthem gets incredibly useful information from these surveys. And increases customer satisfaction along the way. No wonder their site is clearly top-of-the-line.

February 19, 2019
Hospital-based Innovation in Wellness
I was shocked to discover on a recent visit that a giant but innovative local hospital system has implemented a break-through in wellness. They have adapted some of the industry's leading-edge employee wellness techniques and made them work for patients visiting their hospital, thus adding a whole new dimension in the way they make their patients healthy. Much like my previous report of a EMR interchange break-through, it's so radical and unexpected I wouldn't have believed it unless I had experienced it myself.

Employee Wellness

There has been growing recognition that healthy, happy employees are productive and good for business. There has also been growing recognition that being healthy goes way beyond responding effectively when you get sick. People increasingly understand that when you're active, fit, engaged and have good eating habits, you are more likely to be healthy and happy.

There's an amazing Oak HC/FT company that's at the forefront of this movement, Limeade. Here's their summary of what they do:

You can see that they clearly understand the relationship between wellness and health.

Even the picture implies that getting people moving, fit and engaged is a major key to success.

Wellness for patients in the hospital

Hospitals are all about old-style health, i.e., responding effectively when people get sick. But some hospitals are really innovative. I visited one today, and the banner they had proudly hanging in a busy central hallway made their commitment to innovation clear.

I admit I thought their innovations were limited to "just" making sick people better. Hah! They are actually pioneering the application of modern wellness techniques to patients visiting for treatment!

Wellness techniques

I guess it's worth reviewing briefly what some of the most important techniques are. I don't think it's mysterious; most people know what they are:
- Exercise. Without exercise, good things don't happen. You've got to move those muscles!
- Heart Rate. Yes, you can lazily move your muscles. But that's not exercise — you've got to elevate your heart rate, so that key muscle also gets exercise!
- Mental exercise. Particularly as you age, exercising your mind in new ways helps keep you young. But even for young people, learning new things and thinking outside your normal comfort zone can give you a major boost.
Wellness during a hospital visit

It would be one thing for a stodgy old hospital to put up signs that encouraged wellness. No big deal! But that's not what these guys did. The very best techniques are ones that don't feel like a burden. They "trick" you into doing something you might think is fun, and along they way, something good takes place, like wellness in this case. It's called "game-i-fi-cation." And that's exactly what I experienced during the course of a normal, every-day visit for a diagnostic procedure at this amazing hospital.

The game started before I got in the door. I was given the address: right on Fifth Avenue, that can't be too hard. But right away, I couldn't find it! I walked up and down the street, finding addresses that are larger and smaller than the one I had been given, and finally concluded that this numberless entrance was probably the right one.

You might think that this is just someone having trouble finding an address. But it's really the low-key start of the game — they draw you in slowly. I looked and looked, and there just was no number! In retrospect, the conclusion is obvious: this is the building in which wellness is slyly delivered to improve everyone's health.

I walked in and found myself in a huge open space. Where should I go?

I walked and turned my head as I went and finally noticed the place where it had to be:

This is surely it — it's clearly labelled cardio-vascular repeatedly, and I was having a heart test. Done. Still clueless about the wellness being delivered to me, I walked in and talked with the nice ladies at the counter. After they determined that I wasn't in the process of dying in front of them, they returned to what they were doing and eventually found out who I was and what I wanted. Oops. I'm in the wrong place. I should return to the giant hall and ask the guard.

Eventually, the helpful guard pointed and gave directions involving walking, turning left and/or right, and going through various doors. Here's the view at this point:

It's a good thing I paid attention, because part of the game is the absence of signs and directions. The theme of finding the right building was intensified once you were inside. And I was beginning to get anxious. While I had left lots of time, this was taking a while, and I didn't want to be late.

I followed the directions carefully and eventually found myself at another counter with friendly people. After identifying myself, I received another set of directions involving things like going straight that way until you get to the grey doors, then go through them and immediately turn right until you get to the end of the hall … well, leaving out details, I found another counter.

Please pay attention to the pattern here, and notice the clear and obvious relationship to wellness techniques:
- Exercise. Definitely.
- Heart rate. I didn't walk that fast, but those clever people managed to get my heart rate up by inducing anxiety!
- Mental exercise. Definitely. Finding the place was at least as good as a Pokemon search! Not having signs or directions is part of the plan! They're really committed to this wellness thing — imagine the trouble they took to assure that all the old signs were removed.
Finally I got to what turned out to be the right place:

But needless to say, my adventure wasn't over. What's a visit to a health professional without a good solid dose of papers with minuscule print, the obvious result of welfare work for lawyers and bureaucrats? But I got a break. Whoever designed the system decided that after such a large and unexpected dose of wellness, the patient should be given a light load of paperwork.
It was laughably small.

And to put it in context, dealing with it was a good way to "cool down" after my adventure in exercise, heart rate elevation and mind stretching achieved by next-generation, gamified wellness techniques.

With any luck, other hospitals will copy this amazing innovation. Who knows, maybe some of them already are!

But that's how hospitals are!

Yes, you're right. But it doesn't have to be that way. Retail stores, for example, compete for customers. They compete on multiple dimensions — product selection, quality and price, but also convenience and overall customer experience. There is no reason why hospitals couldn't pay some moderate amount of attention to the people who are, after all, their paying customers.

Giant, multi-national companies like Ikea, which is many times larger than any hospital, show that it's possible. Ikea puts real effort into creating a good customer experience. Which includes helping customers go where they need to go. They have a mobile app which helps you. They have maps:

And they have signs in the stores, even on the floor and hanging from the ceiling:

Hospitals aren't too big. Their executives are not under-paid. They just have to care.
October 18, 2016
Gartner Group: Showcase of Big Company Customer Service
Giant, powerful organizations nearly always do two things really well:
1. Wax eloquent about how concerned they are with respect, privacy and customer service.
2. Treat their actual customers like disposable pieces of crap.
I've seen lots of examples of this over the years. I've written about it, for example illustrating how HP disrespects its customers with simple things like hard-to-get-out-of email subscriptions you never subscribed to. I've just encountered an even grosser example inflicted on me by the world's leading IT consultant firm, Gartner Group.

Gartner Group

I've known a number of Gartner employees over the years, and most have been hard-working, respectful, knowledgeable people. But Gartner is a big place. They purport to teach the world's companies how to do IT. So how does Gartner itself do IT?

Here's the basic story with Gartner:

In addition to thousands of employees, they're worth billions of dollars:

Their range of activities is amazing. It's clear that they teach IT best practices to important companies all over the world:

It's hard to believe that Gartner's own IT practices wouldn't themselves be world-class. Wouldn't you expect a music teacher to be a master musician?

Gartner email

Somehow I ended up getting spammed by Gartner. I'm not sure how. I got this email:

I didn't ask for it, and I don't want it.

So I went to the bottom, and was assured that Gartner is committed respect, privacy and all the usual big-company boiler plate. And even better, I can unsubscribe!

So what happened? Did I get that satisfying one-click experience that responsible spammers provide? You know, the one that immediately says, "you're out! But if you'd be so kind, please tell us why you're going?" You know, like this:

No. Apparently, Gartner emails are much too important to be simply unsubscribed from. When the page popped up, my eye first went to this, which by itself sets a new record for customer disrespect:

They know my information — they're emailing me! But filling out the form for me? I guess this standard practice is beyond the geniuses at Gartner. Or beneath them. Or they kindly want to make sure I'm qualified to live without their wisdom. Or something.

Then I studied the top part of the page, which provided the detailed instructions that must be meticulously followed in order to unsubscribe. If you're not good at reading and following instructions, the penalty is eternal pounding by unwanted junk mail from Gartner:

I have nothing more to say. Gartner, the billion-dollar advisory firm, leading the way, demonstrating the customer respect that big company customer service is all about. Also demonstrating how carefully crafted words are of supreme importance to such large organizations. Actions that match? Not so much.
July 19, 2016
Giant Software Company Bureaucracies

It is the nature of giant bureaucracies to coerce and control the populations they "serve." Giant bureaucracies also tend to resist change, protect themselves at all cost, operate with laughable inefficiency, and become increasingly disconnected from their supposed mission. This is true whether the bureaucracy is a government agency (illustrated on a small, local scale by the wonderful movie Still Mine)

or a software company. When the bureaucracies are giant software companies, the coercion is often masked in a sickly-sweet cover story about trying to help you, or assuring that things happen with high quality, which just rubs it in.

I recently ran into an example of this with Microsoft. I was trying to play WMA (Windows Media Audio) files that I had created for my own use from CD's I had purchased. In other words, I was trying to do something I should have been able to do.

Why CD's? I had bought them a long time ago, why should I purchase them again digitally when it's legal to create a personal digital copy. Why WMA? At the time, it was technically slightly better than the MP3 easily available to me.

The Random House example (apologies to Random House)

Imagine I had bought a paper book years ago. Now I was trying to open it to re-read a section. When I tried to open it, it won't open! The book was stuck, and there was a knock on my apartment door. There's a loud voice coming from outside: "Open up! Open up! This is Random House!" OMG! What's this about? I can't open my old book, and suddenly some publisher is pounding at my door??

I go to the door, open it, and there's a couple scary-looking guys. They say, "We understand you're trying to open a Random House book. Before you open it, we need to verify that you have the right to do so."

I say, "What do you mean? IT'S MY BOOK! I BOUGHT IT! I'VE OWNED IT FOR YEARS! WHAT RIGHT DO YOU HAVE TO POUND ON MY DOOR AND QUESTION ME?"

They reply, "We're Random House. We're the publishers. You may think you own this book, but we're the publishers. How do we know you own the book legally? We've got to make sure you have the proper rights for this book. Until we receive that assurance, you will not be able to open the book you claim to own."

"OK," I say guardedly. "What do I have to do to convince you I own the book I own?"

"It's simple. Just replace all your phones and your phone service with Random House's. Then our book will be able to call our office and make sure you have the rights you say you have."

"I've heard about the Random House telephone service. It's really crappy. It's full of static. That's why fewer people use it every month, even though it's free. Even worse, crooks have figured out how to use it to see when I'm not home, so they can break in and steal my stuff. If you insanely want to somehow have the book you published be able to 'phone home,' why not just use the phones I've already got, which work great?"

"They're not Random House phones. We can't guarantee their quality or appropriateness. Random House books only work with Random House phones. You can say what you want — but we say that we put our name on it and we stand behind them — and they're the only phones we'll use."

I get the message. I kick myself for being so deluded that I thought buying a book from Random House was a good idea. There's no way I'm trading my secure phones for ones that practically fly a flag to alert all the criminals in the area when the house is vulnerable. I hand the book that I bought and paid for, but which I cannot use, to the agents from Random House, and dis-invite them from my house.

Microsoft and WMA

This is what Microsoft did, acting just like the imagined Random House of my example.

I tried to play my WMA file. It wouldn't play. Instead, just like the agents from Random house pounding on my door, I get this:

Note the copyright, literally ten years ago! Tens of thousands of supposedly super-bright programmers, and they can't manage to keep things up to date?

They "don't support" my web browser, which (on this machine) is Firefox. They insist on using IE, which is of course their own browser. Whose utilization has plummetted from over two-thirds in 2009 to about the same as Firefox last year.

Why do I care? First of all, they shouldn't care. It's outrageous that they do. Second, here's one reason among many why I care:

I might as well fly a flag from my house saying "hey, all crooks in the area, c'mon over, the pickin's are good!" And this isn't the first time — IE is famous for being about the most inept, dangerous-to-use browser in existence. Imagine, a free product with a plummeting market share!

Conclusion

This experience didn't teach me anything I didn't already know. Microsoft isn't unique. It's like every other giant, bumbling bureaucracy: it's an elephant, we're mice, and you'd better look smart and be careful or you'll get crushed. But somehow, when your nose gets rubbed in it, and they effectively steal something from you from your own house (computer), and there's nothing you can do about, I at least get aggravated in spite of myself.

May 4, 2014
Status in Software: Silliness and Stupidity
In all too many software groups, you get higher status by being more removed from actual customers, their needs and concerns. This is bass-ackwards. It's silly. It's perverse. It is profoundly stupid and counter-productive. If this is how your software group works, change it or leave. Now.

The Inward Flow: Support

In most organizations, here is the perverse flow:
- Customer has problem. Contacts Customer Service.
- L1 customer service takes the call or e-mail. Eventually. They try to do something, but don't have much knowledge or power. So after wasting some time, it's off to…
- L2 customer service, which is backed up failing to handle other things L1 already kicked up to them. After wasting some of their own time, and often some of the customer's as well, it's off to…
- L3 customer service, which is the place where the really experienced L2 agents are promoted. Life is messy in L3. All the nasty problems end up there, often with the customer already being (understandably) mad, but too frequently lacking the skills and resources to even reproduce the problem, much less fix it. After spending some time here, the worst problems of the most upset customers migrate to…
- Sustaining engineering. This is the death-watch group in engineering. Two types of characters are typically confined here: ignorant entry-level people who hope to move up and out; and experienced engineers who missed the cut for working on the new stuff. If it's an easy bug, they may be able to fix it. Otherwise…
- …it may actually be necessary to interrupt an exalted person who wrote the code that caused the problem, taking him away from the important business of writing code that has brand-new problems! But this drastic measure is avoided if at all possible.
There are actually more layers to march through, but the pattern should be pretty clear by now: the "most important" people are protected from the consequences of their past mistakes by layers and layers of carefully arranged bureaucracy designed to deflect and defuse any contact with real customers and the problems those customers may be having. The more you know, the more distant you are kept from having your august presence sullied by the trivial annoyances of mere customers. It doesn't need to be this way.

The Outward Flow: Development

When new products are created, it is all too often the case that the higher your status, the more removed you are from contact with the people who will ultimately use the product you create.

In very large organizations, the remote peak of the status hierarchy is occupied by research groups or labs. These are truly hilarious. Why do they have ultimate status? It is a given that they see no customers, hear no customers and talk with no customers; but even better. they produce nothing tangible at all — unless you count academic papers and research reports. Those people are sure important! Their ground-breaking work will (pick your favorite) "lay the foundation for," "create the basis of," or "make the discovery on which" generations of future products will be built. Sure.

Smaller organizations would love to have such a group — it's prestigious! — but instead make do with a few exalted individuals who think deep thoughts and create "architectures" that "solve" a wide range of present and future problems.

High level design people then take over to create a "design" within the "architecture." This is not easy! It's important to fend off the constant pressure to produce something practical that works for today's customers, in favor of doing the design "the right way," i.e., spending lots of time thinking about problems some customers may have in some unspecified future, and "creating a framework" that will supposedly make them easy to solve.

At this point, software development splits into an alphabet soup of competing creeds, each of them certain of their unique virtue and access to software heaven. There is the much-maligned waterfall, agile, SCRUM, extreme, and on and on. The details of what happens next vary. The status relationships and ultimate outcomes are pretty much the same: the more important you are, the less likely you are to have meaningful contact with customers. This remains true as the software staggers through phases that may various include integration, testing, staging, documentation and roll-out.

Finally — finally! — the software is inflicted on the customers for whose benefit it was built. All I can say is that the chorus of complaints, however loud it may be, is rarely loud enough to penetrate the excellent sound insulation of the rooms in which the company's "brain trust" festers.

Conclusion

If you want to run a charity organization for egotistical, self-absorbed and self-important programmers (OMG! Did I just use the demeaning term "programmers," implying these people might actually lower themselves to doing actual, like, work!? I meant to use a more elevated term like "intergalactic systems architect" or "chief scientist.") — like I was saying, if it's your goal to provide welfare to high-minded computer scientists, by all means employ a staff of "elite" techies and help them avoid being interrupted by the hoi polloi. Their deep pondering is way too valuable to be sullied in any way by the mundane concerns of the common people. If, on the other hand, you have real work to do and want your best people to lead, then make sure that the closer people are to customers the more status they have. Building a product or service that real people value and want to use requires — gasp — contact and interaction with those same real people.
October 31, 2011
Chase’s Exemplary Handling of Data Theft
I think if Chase had really tried, they could have done a worse job telling customers about the recent security breach.

Background

Apparently being incapable of performing the requisite fairly simply processing and analysis on their own, Chase and other giant financial institutions give their customers' data to Epsilon (among others!) for marketing-related processing. Despite (I assume) conforming to all the odious rules and regulations for keeping the data secure, Epsilon somehow suffered a major data breach; in order to protect the guilty, the details have not been released.

Chase's e-mail

Naturally, Chase and others rushed to assure their customers that everything was really OK, while providing them with helpful hints about avoiding getting scammed by all the crooks who now have the data. Here's the one I received.

Why Chase deserves an award for Badness

Chase provides a wealth of examples not to follow if you want to treat your customers with respect. Here are a few of the highlights.
- Timing. The breach reportedly took place on March 30. It was made public the following day. I received Chase's e-mail on the evening of April 4. Boy, Chase sure fell over themselves getting the word out to their customers, didn't they?
- What was stolen. Epsilon's own press release admits that not only customer e-mail addresses, but also names were stolen. If you read Chase's tardy missive word for word, you notice that they carefully omit to tell their customers that their names were also stolen, while repeating that no "customer account or financial information" was stolen. Surely a customer's name is part of that customer's account! If not, exactly what is it? Why couldn't they just be honest, and tell me that my name was stolen too?
- What was stolen. Epsilon's second press release emphasizes how they have absolutely, definitely, no-kidding determined that nothing but names and e-mails have been stolen. I'm sorry, but this can't possibly be true. Chase isn't using Epsilon just to do e-mail blasts. They are using them for their analysis based on detailed customer information. According to Epsilon itself, this data includes "Comprehensive income, credit, debt and asset data." It is simply not credible to claim that this data could not be deduced by the thieves from what they took. Neither Chase nor Epsilon bothers to mention all the customer-specific information they've got, which also includes "age, marital status, occupation, ethnicity and changes such as a new child, a move, changes in household income or a new driver."
- Disastrous advice. Look at the list of recommendations in the e-mail. Do they once, even once, describe, mention or warn against phishing, which is the real danger of having this information out there? They do not! What do they warn against? Repeatedly, they tell you not to put sensitive information into an e-mail, or to respond to a spam e-mail. When the real danger is phishing!
- Unwanted spam. I can't help pointing out that Chase gives me the incredibly insightful advice to "be on the lookout for unwanted spam." As opposed to the spam I want? After I've identified my spam and put it into "wanted" and "unwanted" piles, exactly what should I do? Since I was told to be "on the lookout" for it, I guess I should spend some time looking at it.
- Follow up. Chase promises to tell me "everything we know as we know it, and will keep you informed…" Simply put, there has been no follow-up. If you're not going to do it, don't say that you will.
Summary

It is clear that Chase
- notified its customers tardily,
- demonstrably lied about what was stolen,
- gave terrible and/or laughable advice about what the customer should do,
- and finally made promises they failed to keep.
Could they have done worse? Probably. Meanwhile, let's use this as an anti-role-model for how to handle situations of this kind.
April 11, 2011
Bad Customer Service: Whose Fault is it?

When a customer gets bad customer service, who's at fault? The person delivering the bad service, right? In some cases, yes, of course. But in a variety of important cases, the person delivering the bad service is not at fault, but gets blamed (or blasted!) for it anyway, while the guilty party gets promoted.

Sounds strange, right? But it's all too common. I experienced it personally last weekend, and my own experience will illustrate the point quite nicely.

The Cablevision Store

After several years of fine service, my cable modem started showing signs of dementia, wandering off into disfunction with increasing frequency, the only cure for which was a hard re-boot. After several weeks of wishful thinking, I finally accepted reality and took my old cable modem to the cable company's store to trade it in for a newer model last Saturday.

Shortly after starting my transaction, another customer came into the nearly-empty store with a DVR. He went up to the service person next to mine, handed over the DVR, and explained his issue. He said that he had been given the wrong DVR the day before — he needed one with an HDMI connection. Could he please trade for the right box?

I'm sorry, says the pleasant CSR (customer service representative), we're out of those boxes. You'll have to come back next week. That's when the fireworks started.

"I spend $250 a month for your service…how can you be out of DVR's?? … I demand to speak to a manager … I can't come back on Monday, I work in the City and Saturday is my only day for getting stuff like this done …"

It got worse. Various impolite words started flowing freely…

…inspiring the large fellow helping me to try to calm the guy down, telling him there's no need to use language like that, etc. In the end, he stormed out with his non-functional DVR without a resolution.

Meanwhile, I got a new cable modem with no instructions. I was told to just plug it in and it would work.

Who is Responsible for the Customer's Bad Experience?

The CSR's in the little store-front operation? Hardly. They were pleasant enough. But they didn't have what the guy needed — and had every right to expect! This is a guy who's headed right to FIOS, in spite of Verizon's well-deserved reputation for equally horrific customer service.

OK, so who is at fault here? It's hard to know for sure, but it is likely to be some combination of simple incompetence in the people and/or systems that manage inventory at the stores…

…which wouldn't be a bit surprising… or it's some "clever" person in management or finance trying to make the corporation some extra profit (and themselves a promotion) by shaving down the inventory levels even further…

(credit: www.bybee.com)

More Where that Came From

I started thinking about all this as I drove home and started installing my new cable modem. I replaced it exactly, and it didn't work! OMG!! It's a new cable modem! What could be wrong? I checked the cables. I rebooted a few times. I replaced all the cables. Could my wireless router have somehow gone bad at the same time? Out to the store, bring home new wireless router, install, no improvement. Probably the new cable modem is simply dead. It's too late to return to the Cablevision store, so I get on chat. The guy asks me to run a test, and by the time I'm back (all of 3 minutes later), my session has been timed out for inactivity! So I log in again (requiring another download of the chat program), and the fellow can't "see" my modem from the network side. No surprise. He asks me to connect it to the place where the cable service enters my house, and he still can't see it. So he agrees that it's bad, and actually gives me an appointment for a service call on Monday.

All I can say is, thank goodness for neighbors who install WiFi without security.

The service guy shows up on Monday, looks at my new cable modem, and immediately says, "they gave you one of those?" It turns out the service guy knows that these devices are obsolete and notoriously unreliable. As I have confirmed yet again. He hooks up a new cable modem he had brought with him and everything works fine. Problem solved.

Whose fault was the bad customer service I received? The people in the store? The people on chat? The guy who came to my house? Of course, the answer is none of the above.

If you tried to track down the person actually responsible for the bad service I (and many, many like me) received, you'd run into something like this:

(Credit: Animation Guild)

Again, the root cause is likely to be some combination of hard-to-fathom incompetence, simple clueless-ness and actual, anti-customer changes made by someone who thinks they can advance in their career by making things worse for customers. Sadly, this is all too often how organizations, large and small, actually work … unless you take constructive steps like this to make it otherwise.

April 4, 2011
Kayak and Customer Intimacy

Kayak is a case study in how to get engineers to interact with customers to move your product or service ahead rapidly.

Paul English, their excellent CTO, put up a recent blog post on the subject that humorously features a red phone.

I continue to be amazed at how frequently organizations try to protect those "precious, critical path resources," their engineers.

The engineers are often complicit in this. They do all this project planning and get signed up for an ambitious string of deliverables. Then things happen — new requirements come along, some things are harder and take longer, they are late and feeling the pressure. How do think they react when some well-intentioned, idealist jerk comes along and talks about what a great idea it is to have engineers handling customer requests and complaints directly? R-rated, to say the least.

It's the whole way organizations are set up that leads to everyone thinking that the "red phone" is a terrible idea. And that's a good test for your organization — if the "red phone" seems like a terrible idea, then maybe your organization needs to change.

February 4, 2010