6 Common Horrors

SCENES FROM THE NEW ECONOMY:
6 COMMON E-COMMERCE HORRORS

James R. Rosenfield

November, 2001

Back last year, using my new home DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) I ordered a Le Creuset 7-Quart French Oven (Electric Blue) from Amazon.com.

It took the entire year 2000 to get the DSL, an endeavor punctuated by some of the most ludicrous episodes in my life as a customer.

First we went through several DSL companies who simply didn't show up. Then our ultimate supplier had to make five runs to my house to fix things they screwed up. Each time, the dispatcher told me the technician would be there between 8:00 AM and noon. Each time I told her that's unacceptable. Each time I got into a confrontation with her, spoke to her supervisor, and of course got a commitment for a specific time, commitments that, in fairness to this gang of raving incompetents, were actually met.

Twice a guy named Adam came, who, like his Edenic forbear, did his damnedest to drive us from the modest paradise of our domicile.

One night, having arrived at 4:00 PM, he was still traipsing around at dinnertime, effectively ruining our evening. And never getting anything right. Another day, he broke a phone, and offered me five dollars for it. I told him he wasn't leaving until he fixed it, and of course within five minutes it was fixed. After that he was banned from our house, and if I ever see him again I will definitely do him damage.

As a painful footnote to the above, our DSL supplier went out of business not long after all of this pain and suffering, leaving us high, dry, offline, and deceived. Yes, gentle reader, we were lied to repeatedly both by the DSL provider and by our Internet Service Provider, who in turn went out of business soon afterwards!

Providentially, cable modem became available in our neighborhood at just this point. It was installed by a gang of incompetents only slightly better than Adam. Then, of course, our local cable company was swallowed up by someone else, but I think it'll be OK: The new cable company is Adelphia, and they have a stadium named after them. Wait a minute…Enron has a stadium named after them also! Well, so it goes in Year 2002…

Getting back to Amazon, I wanted the French oven by the end of the week as a gift for my wife. And I used the experience as Freddie's introduction to the wonders of e-Commerce.

Nothing worked right, of course.

I'm a 1-click customer on Amazon. It's a great technology both for Amazon and its customers,
because it makes ordering irresistibly easy. Unless you want to change something.

I wanted to change both shipping address and method of shipping. No way.

I ended up canceling the order, abandoning 1-click, and re-ordering. It's the e-Commerce equivalent of having to travel to the no-man's land of customer service high up in the Tiffany's flagship 5th Avenue store, one of the most dreadful retail experiences known to humankind.

The e-Commerce bubble has, of course, long since burst. Will it ever blow our way again? Of course not-bubbles by definition don't regenerate. But e-Commerce-or whatever it ultimately will be called-is certainly the future of direct marketing. And because indeed the Internet changes everything, folks who turn their backs on the new technologies will of course be as benighted as those who thought the Web was the one and only way.

It would be nice, though, if e-Commerce companies started getting things approximately right.
Here are some ways they keep getting things wrong…

6 COMMON E-COMMERCE HORRORS

1) The infinitely regressive transaction.

I requested American Express Blue online, and things went smoothly until I was asked to
"Create a User ID & Password." Nothing worked: not my usual passwords, not my usual ID's, nor variations of them, nor a run through 19th Century Russian novelists. Anything I tried simply brought me back to "The password you selected is not valid."

One good practice, though, at the Blue Website was the presence of an 800 number, usually as difficult to find on the Web as an honest person at a political convention. I called the 800 number and a nice customer service rep explained that the server was acting up.

She asked me if I wanted additional cards, and I got some for my dogs. I told her I didn't know their birth dates or social security numbers, and that was OK with her. I enjoyed her agreeability, but worried about Blue's issuance policies.

The kind of frustrating loop described above can be experienced outside the e-commerce world also. Best example is when you call a customer service line and no matter what you do, you're looped back to the beginning of the menu.

No wonder customers hate companies.

2) Obtuse use of language.

Because so many Internet-oriented companies are (or were) run by engineers and venture capitalists, some of the most fundamental of marketing fundamentals are often lacking.

I visited the soon-to-be-defunct Next Card site back a year or two ago, and decided to get an
Internet-oriented credit card. "Tell us about yourself," I was commanded. "Send your application," I was ordered.

Citibank and other smart financial marketers discovered back in the '80s that the word "Please" is magical, and that avoiding the word "application" improves response, because "application" connotes rejection, something people dislike, particularly from a financial institution.

But along with ignorance, there's sometimes a willful arrogance on the Web, as if the Old Economy stuff no longer applies. One positive fallout of the dotcom crash, of course, is a lessening of this kind of immaturity.

History tells us that culture, past practice, and-alas, sometimes-history itself are hard to suppress. They'll lie low for a while, as did the oldest of the Old Economy during those bubbly weeks and months, but they'll come back with a vengeance. The 1960s, remember, were followed by two terms (well, not quite) of Richard Nixon.

3) Customer-unfriendly inconsistencies.

It's unkind of me to pick on Next Card, which, as of the time of this writing, is looking for a buyer, and forbidden by bank regulators to do much of anything. But they provide so many excellent bad practices. For example, they requested a secret code between 5 and 12 characters long. I did one with 5 characters, because that's one of my standard secret codes. So far, no problem

They then made me a good offer, where I could save 10% at Tower Records, an establishment where I've been known to melt a credit card or two.

Problem is, a 6 character secret code was required for the promotion. I assure you that life is too short to have two secret codes for one company.

(Parenthetically I'd like to add that encryption is probably making us all even crazier and more paranoid than we are already, which is saying something post-September 11. Amazon got things screwed up a few months back, and I had to change my secret code, and now I don't even remember it half the time. The Amazon person on the phone allowed as how it's a good idea occasionally to change your code anyway, for security reasons, which immediately made me feel insecure. Combine encryption with the aging baby boomers, whose memories are likely to be a bit less sharp as time goes on, and one can envision a nation of zombie-like paranoids, forever wandering with fixed expressions, trying to remember what code applies to what company.)

4) Lack of responsiveness.

Let me harp on bad-loan ridden Next Card just one more time. My wife told me she hated their statement, so I sent an e-mail asking if they had contemplated making it more user-friendly. My e-mail went out Sept. 7, and the next thing I saw was their October newsletter, a month later. In other words, no response at all, not even the kind of brainless automatic responses you get from Amazon.

Back then I was a good customer of Next Card. No longer though, because of fraudulent use that continued through a reissued credit card number, and refused to abate through several long months. It involved thousands of dollars charged in Barcelona, Spain, a city I have never visited. And the customer service from Next Card is of course a total nightmare.

How depressing this is! I just wonder about ordinary consumers, since I'm able to take care of myself, and I know a lot about the credit card business. But the company's sheer lack of basics is surprising even to me.

5) Too much technology, not enough psychology.

21st Century marketing, it seems clear to me, should consist of excellent technology combined with superb psychology. Usually companies don't get either right, but occasionally someone will get one right at the cost of the other. Amazon at its best comes very close to the ideal, but, as outlined above, Amazon is not always at its best.

Back to American Express Blue, which we discussed earlier. When the card first came out, you could get a reader that accessed information from the chip that's on the card. But when you visited the Blue Website to obtain the reader, the information was so technologically challenging that unless you were a computer scientist, you'd bail out in a hurry. I called a customer service rep, and she just giggled.

Not to demean the culture and sophistication of AmEx's customer service reps, incidentally.
but a friend of mine who recently visited Freud's house in Vienna and bought a book there had
reason to speak to an AmEx rep, who looked at his records, and confirmed him visiting "Australia" where he went to the "Frood" museum.

6) Privacy obtuseness.

I've been preaching this sermon for years, and I'm still fearful of fire and brimstone coming. It was bad enough in the pre-Internet days, but now there's simply too much information under too little control. Regardless of anyone's good intentions, the Genie is already out of the bottle, and something bad is going to happen.

"The Net's going to go fumbling along until there's a massive (privacy) intrusion. Then everything will hit the fan. Congress is going to go ballistic, and we're going to panic our way into doing something," observed Dave Farber, Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Trade Commission, in the June 25, 2000 New York Times.

Amen, unfortunately. And the Direct Marketing Association is not much help. They announced
last year a $100 million PR campaign they're involved in along with such questionable characters as DoubleClick. I haven't seen evidence of it, so maybe they thought better of it. Better to spend the money on educating businesses, rather than consumers. But unfortunately it probably doesn't matter much by now. The privacy apocalypse may already be in motion, a speck on the horizon that will turn into Godzilla when it reaches shore.

Look at the Hertz Website's privacy pages for an example of how not to do it: dense, legalistic, with all the burdens placed on the customer.

As counterpoint, access Citibank's "privacy promise," the absolute model of the genre, clear and customer-friendly as can be. It transcends just being a privacy policy in fact, and becomes a privacy mission statement, which one would think should be de rigueur for every large company that deals with consumer data. Kudos to Citi, who are way ahead of the pack.