Are you listening to your customers?

The local bank, for example, decided that adding a seventh and eighth digit to its two-factor authentication system would make it more secure (it’s a vanishingly small difference, but that’s a story for another day.) I’m sure that they didn’t consider the cost to the thousands of customers who will use it millions of times of day. Remembering 43948394 is very different than remember 439234.

Or consider this note from the TTP website:

“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.”

Check back when? How often?

By Seth Godin — Is there a marketing person leading the IT team?

The post ends as follows:

Now, marketing is everything you do. And what you do either adds to the experience or takes away from it.

If your company lives and dies by software, where are the marketers on your software team?

Above is a pertinent question for everyone in the IT field. Sharing a relevant experience, where I was at the receiving end.

A few weeks back, I visited the pension office to submit the living certificate for my father. After providing the details, we got a confirmation that the “application is submitted successfully”.

A couple of days later, we received the following message:

XXX has been rejected due to Neither PPO No nor A/c No. available in EPFO Database

I didn’t have any clue on what this is and what to do next? But am sure that the details I provided were correct. So I visited the office to know the next step. From the facial expression of the person at the counter (let’s call him Sam) that he also couldn’t gather much from the message.

Sam opened up a portal and searched the details I provided. He couldn’t get the details at first, but after a lot of trial and error, he found the details in the system. The particulars shown confirmed that the pension was hitting the same bank account number till date. But that doesn’t explain why the current application failed.

Sam recommended that maybe the format of the number given earlier might be wrong, so let’s try something different. But we got the same result 😔

I realised there is no meaning in going back to Sam. Few recommended that I get in touch with the head office than the local offices where Sam worked.

Luckily we could reach out to Mary, an employee at the head office, through a relative. Mary looked at the details and got back:

The application for renewal of the living certificate is failing because the pension is closed. The duration of the pension was 20 years which is completed now.

What a contrast between the actual reason for failure and the message I received. My father, because of his age, doesn’t remember that the pension was for 20 years. I too learned that all pensions are not lifelong.

I went back to the details in the portal and saw that the status is written as “Closed”. But nowhere it is mentioned that the duration is 20 years and its closed due to that. Sam also didn’t notice the status.

If Mary and Sam believed in the “marketing” as Seth Godin mentioned above, they would surely bring the issue to the IT department’s attention. It will help the department to improve and make it more useful for common man. But considering how these offices work, the chances of that happening is rare.

The person in the IT may not have ever seen or heard how much the users struggle while using the software that he/she built. The software systems will have been remarkably different if the IT team visits the office at least once.

Many people were asking Sam “I didn’t understand this. What should I do next?”. I also could see the same expression in Sam’s face — “I wish I had an answer, even I don’t understand this”. 😢

As Seth Godin wrote in the post, anything that you do either adds to the experience or takes away from it. And it is sad to see that many knowingly have chosen to be part of who takes away the experience. Hardly anyone cares.

Thankfully, we have chosen to speak to customers on a regular basis. I can confidently say, when I write code, the intention is always to improve the experience. We will not be successful all the times, so speak to customers and find out.

My experience was a good reminder for me about a lot of things I’ve written in the past:

• Never forget the poor users
• Feedback is important for discovery
• The importance of asking the right questions
• No one size fits all. So personal attention for customers is necessary
• Exceptions have to be exceptions. While writing code, handle errors gracefully.