The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Do computers work for humans, or the other way around?
Tuesday - June 06, 2006 02:29 PM in
Argh!
I was ordering something online earlier today, and after going through all the steps of creating an account, verifying my e-mail address, and entering my payment information, the website rejected my credit card info with the following error:
Invalid Payment Information: Expiration date is invalid format. You must enter the expiration date as MMYY.
I had made the egregious error of entering the expiration date as 01/08.
I was terribly tempted to abandon the purchase at this point and take it somewhere else. I probably would have, too, except that the item I was buying is only available from a handful of places, and I didn't have a lot of other options.
Consider that it takes about three lines of code to make the online form smart enough to accept a variety of different formats for dates. As a bonus, you can probably get it to accept credit card numbers with spaces at the same time.
So why do we accept stupid things like this?
There's really no excuse other than bad design and laziness, and when a company doesn't make the minimal effort to create a user-friendly order form, it makes me think that they don't really respect my (i.e. their customer's) time.
After all, the computer is supposed to be here for my convenience. Not the other way around.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Invalid Payment Information: Expiration date is invalid format. You must enter the expiration date as MMYY.
I had made the egregious error of entering the expiration date as 01/08.
I was terribly tempted to abandon the purchase at this point and take it somewhere else. I probably would have, too, except that the item I was buying is only available from a handful of places, and I didn't have a lot of other options.
Consider that it takes about three lines of code to make the online form smart enough to accept a variety of different formats for dates. As a bonus, you can probably get it to accept credit card numbers with spaces at the same time.
So why do we accept stupid things like this?
There's really no excuse other than bad design and laziness, and when a company doesn't make the minimal effort to create a user-friendly order form, it makes me think that they don't really respect my (i.e. their customer's) time.
After all, the computer is supposed to be here for my convenience. Not the other way around.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 02:29 PM by | | | |