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The 2 minute task… that lasted much longer than that |
| By:Himanshu Jhamb on Sun 09 Nov 2008 3:13 AM under Business, Get Organized, Management |
Ever been very busy with getting through your day & suddenly realizing that you need to remit the monthly payment on your auto-insurance policy, thinking it’d just take you 2 minutes (praise the blessing of being living in times of eCommerce enabled websites) and you’d get back to what you were doing? What a feeling of accomplishment, having checked off that nagging item of your ‘To-do’ list, in a matter of minutes (2, in this case).
Welcome to the world of frustrating websites that make these 2 minutes the longest 2 minutes.
A point in example, the AAA website (http://www.csaa.com) provides customers with the ability to setup recurrent monthly payments by debiting their savings/checking accounts in the amount they choose (usually the amount due monthly as a monthly premium on the policy). The frustration started setting in when firstly, the website took me to a page where I had to choose my ‘Policy Type’ and enter my ‘Policy Number’, once I logged in:
1) Intuitive behavior: Website should be intuitive enough to display all the policies held by a customer, once the customer logs in. It is time consuming to enter your policy number (as it involves looking it up from a bill or the policy documents – there go my 2 minutes, already!). But, that’s not the main gripe I have.
2) Consistency in the instructions and the actual behavior: Underneath the text box where the page asks for the policy number, it says “Please enter your Homeowners policy in the box above using only numbers, no letters or dashes. For example if your policy is HO-6789123, only enter 6789123″. No problem, I say to myself, and enter my policy number without ‘VA’ (my policy number is VAxxxxx where the x’s denote numbers). that took me to an error page that complained the policy number was incorrect. When I entered the complete policy number, it went through without any issues. Conclusion: There’s an inconsistency in the instructions and the actual behavior (by the way, this took another 2 minutes of my time).
3) Simple Validations should work: Once I managed to cross the aforementioned hurdle (some might argue minor), I go to a form where they ask me to enter my bank info (Routing #, Acct # et al). I entered all this stuff carefully, hit the ‘Submit’ button even more carefully (and started praying). Lo and behold! I was taken to an error page saying that said the bank account number cannot be less than 9 digits! I thought to myself: Looks like I’ll have to complain to my bank that all their account numbers need to be changed to have at least 9 digits.
That did it for me! Agreed most major US banks might have account numbers that have more than 9 digits but what about the exceptions (such as my credit union)? My next action – I looked at my watch (it was 15 minutes since I had started my rendezvous with the AAA website) in horror, thought to myself if it might’ve been faster (and easier) to just call them and get this done & logged out (the one action that website owners relate to as one similar to drowning)
Bottomline, all ye websites boasting of eCommerce capabilities, test test test and then test some more, before you put these features online. Every minute that you save your customer translates into $$… the bad news, every minute you cost your customer also translates into $$…
- HJ
