I go the Aeroplan site and apply for a card. So far so good. Next page is where problems really start kicking in. First of all, I don’t get a Captcha image!

Weird I tell myself so I hit the “get another image” button without any luck. Being a geek, I look at the source code and try to generate an image manually – no luck. Oh well, I guess the server must be down or something..?

However, since I don’t use Internet Explorer, I decided to give it another try with the devil’s browser. And guess what? The image appears! Nice usability work guys…

Now look at this. This is the crappiest Captcha I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not a Captcha, it’s almost brain washing. Trust me, when you click “Try another image”, you get all kinds of funny messages like “2000 PaRTnerS wHo LoVe YoU Wo0t!!!11!!” and so on. And as you can guess, it’s pretty hard to type as you need to constantly switch between lowercase and uppercase.

BTW, is there really so much frequent flyer card fraud that you need to put captchas to prevent this? I’d like to know.

Oh well, let’s continue shall we? After all the work spent, let’s not stop here. Not that I really need the card but I might as well finish what I was doing…

Here comes the submit button – all looks good! Oh wait… another error? This time it says that my “street number” is out of range?

What kind of error is that? I live where I live, and my address is a 4 digit number. My address is not THAT big, how can it be out of range? So just for fun, I removed some digits until I eventually tried a one digit address – still no luck.

WTF?

Well at this point, I’m pretty upset but I still want my damn card. I have no idea what else to try… I guess that 99% of people would’ve quit at this point BUT NOT ME! :)

So I tried a few things, you know, basic try and error process… I finally changed the street name and added “rue” in front of it and guess what? It freaking worked! 

So you tell me: how could a normal person (i.e. someone like my dad who is not computer savvy) could EVER figure out that error message? How can a normal person know that “street NUMBER out of range” really means “we couldn’t lookup your street NAME in our cheezy database”…?!?

What kind of shitty programming is that? What if you live in a new development where your street name might not be in their database yet? You are SO screwed!

I finally got my card and I hope I’ll never have to go back on that site. Anyone got any scary stories like that?

Like most, if not all, car owners I had to buy a set of winter tires. Like most CFO’s would do, I did some price comparision only to find out how incredibly price fluctuates from a vendor to another. Not only price but price/quality. You see, I read a lot of tire reviews from all type of sources, read consumer reports and so on. I set my mind on a specific brand and looked around.  While I won’t say the names of the stores I visited, let’s say that the first one is a Canadian store and they sell tires. They didn’t have my brand but offered me “a comparable quality”. So I got my first quote, and my first shock. I then decided that there’s a better way to get quotes: let’s go back home and surf. 

Now buying tires online in Canada is not quite there yet. You’d think that with the law forcing Quebecois to buy tires that there would be a tires-r-us.qc.ca but there’s no such thing. Disappointed I was. I finally managed to find tires and rims for my car. Close to 1000 dollars for 4 pieces of metal and 4 blobs of soft rubber. Ouch! I took a closer look and estimated that the technology behind the rims is probably 75 years old (basic metal molding) and the tires, well that’s hard to tell as we can’t see inside the tire. Still, it’s pretty hard to tell that each tire is worth over 150$ a piece.

About the same time, I bought a new SLR camera. Unlike the snow tires, I’ve been wanting to get one for quite some time and managed to get a “good deal”. I also paid about 1000$ for the camera and I felt so much better buying a 1000$ camera than 1000$ worth of tires and rims. 

Why?

Because “I can see what I’m buying”. I can see the value and the technology behind the camera. I know that the camera maker invested millions in research and development, that they worked hard on optics, making the body as small as possible without compromising image quality and so on.

Did I get the same feeling with my tires? Hell no. In fact, I felt insulted that I had to pay 1000$ for basic, almost raw, material. Even though I opted for top quality tires, I feel that they look no better than cheaper tires from that Canadian store.

So with this in mind. When you try to sell a product, make sure you sell not only quality but a feeling of recomfort. Make sure your customers are getting the same value and feeling than when I bought my new camera.

Bad monitor

It all started about 2 weeks ago when my 20″ Benq LCD broke. I was pretty annoyed as I paid big bucks back then and half of the screen would go blank at any time. I like to use 100% of my screen, not just 50% of it.

Luckily the warranty was still valid so I called the help desk (BTW, I’ll cut the usual “did you check your cable?” stuff as you know what I’m talking about) and managed to find a local drop off location in Montreal. That’s neat as I didn’t have the original box (who does after more than 2 years?!?). I nicely explained the guy that my monitor suffered from an IN-TER-MIT-TENT issue and translated it in baby language for him by telling him not to simply hook it for 5 minutes but rather to use it as his own monitor. “You can’t miss it” I told him. I even printed out a picture that I took with my digital camera. “Kapish?” I asked. So I left, thinking that I did a great job explaining the problem and felt better about giving the guy extra customer support tips. “We’ll call you in a week” he said as I left. Great! I thought, now it’s time to get that CRT from the garage – always handy…

A week or so later, I get a voice mail saying that they couldn’t see any problem and they would ship the monitor back. I was like “aaahhh (censored) what is this?!” Then, I noticed a second message which said that they hooked my monitor and noticed the problems immediately. What..?! What did you guy do all that time? The message also said that they needed to order a part and it will take a few more days. Ok, I can handle this. I’m a patient guy…

Next thing I know, I get a FedEx sticker on my door, then a second the next day (as I work and no, I am not home between 9AM to 5PM). I found it odd as I didn’t order anything. I called Benq and asked for a status report: part still not received, it should take a couple of extra days. Hmm ok.. So I called FedEx and ask them about the package. Hey guess what! It’s from Benq. Nice communication. Finally went home and called FedEx around 7pm to see if they could come to my house after 5PM (as I have a life during their regular work hours). I had to wait 28 minutes to speak to someone. 28 minutes! Good thing I was using a speakerphone and had something else to do. Spoke to them and, of course, no can do… they only deliver during regular business hours and I have to pick it up within 7 days or it will be shipped back. Nice. All right, so let’s go and pick it up. Oh wait, they are not in Dorval as someone would expect (you know, that would be close to the airport – which they probably use a lot). Not even in Montreal. But in frickin’ St-Hubert. So those who don’t know St-Hubert, well it takes more than 30 minutes (without traffic) just to go there. Great…! Good thing I have a car. What if I didn’t like a lot of Montrealers?

Got there, saw the box and it felt like their semi-truck stepped over it a couple of times. It was in a pretty bad condition and I almost refused the shipment. I opened the box over there and fortunately, there were no scratches (really, I am still amazed about that). I hooked it up over there and noticed the “splash screen”. I didn’t see any dead pixels so I took a chance and took it home with me.

Got home and…. guess what? The DVI port doesn’t work. Got to start this crap over once more…!

Canceling a credit card

I decided to cancel my HBC card recently since I only used it to get 10% off a xmas gift (and an extra 10$ off). I totally forgot about that card but was reminded by smail (spam mail). I never use store credit cards but this was a tempting offer and I was happy to lower their profit margin. Anyways, I first called them at around 7:45pm. You know, after dinner and a bit of work & clean-up. I got the usual “your call is important” stuff and waited. As I said, I don’t really mind as I have a hands free phone and I always have something to do other than listening to their music. Then suddenly, at 8:00pm I was disconnected with a very friendly message: “Our office is now closed, please call back tomorrow. Thank you, bye now, *click*”

Wow… I was telling myself that not only this is totally inappropriate (how many customers got the “boot” like me?) but it was very un-professional if not amateurish at best. Those call centers know that X number of people are waiting and they should start refusing people in advance based on the estimated call length. You could also stop taking calls at 8pm but for the love of god (replace with preferred deities here) please don’t treat people like this. It’s really bad. I don’t even hang up to telemarketers although I don’t really appreciate their existence (who does?).

People work during the day. I’m not going to exit a meeting to cancel my credit card, come on! I leave work early, live close to my work place and yet, I am not available until 7:00pm – 7:30pm. Why can’t I cancel my card at 2:00am if I want to? I mean, the service is already outsourced to a different time zone anyways so it’s not like workers over there are anxious to get home and have dinner. It’s the middle of the night anyways.

The moral of the story

End users can’t and don’t want to take this sort of behaviour from big companies. If you don’t offer exceptional (or at least very good) service, people will leave you and go see your competitor. It’s one thing to get a new customer but it’s another thing to keep him loyal to you. I think this applies in every company. Be it a large company or a 1 person startup. I’m taking notes and so should you.

The theory behind customer satisfaction

Ok, now you may laugh a bit but I just came up with a theory. It’s very simple and it is based on the sigmoidal curve. The variables don’t quite follow a typical sigmoidal function and are as follow:

x is the size of the company
y is the size of the market
z is the adaptation to the growing market

z is a special variable. It is the adaptation to the market growth. The faster your market grows, the more users will experiment bad service as you simply can’t keep up with your market growth. How well or how bad you do will dictate how fast you reach the dissatisfaction plateau. That’s why the curve starts slowly, is rather abrupt in the middle and ends slowly. The middle part is the hectic part where management desperately tries to fix things but they simply can’t. The dissatisfaction plateau is inevitable if x and y are large unless you are quick at adjusting the z variable.

So you can be a large company, sell a specific item to a small market and have a very good ratio. For example GE which sells medical equipment to hospitals, might score well here as they also have the ability to rapidly adapt well to a growing market. However, GE also sells appliances like stoves and fridges and I suspect they will score less there.

So if you are a small or medium business, you must ensure that you have a growth plan otherwise “z” will take you down and you will lose a lot of customers.