Hooray For Technology (?)
In the past couple of days I’ve had curious experiences with fairly large companies, involving problems with technology. It’s surprising when such companies overlook seemingly obvious opportunities for service recover, and it makes me wonder what happened to the fine art of paying attention to details.
My position is this: sophisticated technology requires a sophisticated user. Especially if the user is a large corporation.
Experience #1
The old DVD burner in my computer has been problematic lately and last weekend I decided to replace it with a new one. I picked out a nice new unit from a well-known and highly reputable consumer electronics manufacturer. It installed beautifully and is a great drive. After completing the installation I decided to go online to register my purchase as per the manufacturer’s direction in the owner’s manual. To my surprise, the manufacturer’s “register your purchase” subdomain was very broken… lots of SQL errors being thrown, with lots of partially-loaded pages crashing at the point where the database call is made. At the bottom of the page, I noted a little tag line saying “copyright 2003 xxxx corporation”. I looked all over the site and couldn’t find any way to contact the manufacturer, so I went to their home page and started hunting. I discovered that there was a “register your purchase” area on the main site, so I attempted to proceed… to my surprise, my brand new device wasn’t even listed, and therefore I could not complete my registration. Again I looked all over the site for a way to contact the manufacturer, and eventually used GOOGLE to find an actual email address for them.
I sent this manufacturer an email explaining the problems I had faced and indicated the potential source of their SQL error.
Their email response arrived the next day. In so many words it was “hey thanks for your email. we just looked into this and there isn’t a problem. thanks for contacting us.” And sure enough, when I checked later that day, both sites were fixed and I could register my new DVD drive. And the copyright line on the bottom of the page NOW reads “copyright 2007 xxxx corporation”.
Uh… it was broken. And somebody got my email and raised the alert to get it fixed, And then somebody wrote back to say there hadn’t ever been a problem. It isn’t as if this is a small company or one that is new to the market. Apparently they’ve neglected their consumer product registration web site since 2003 (!) and given the difficulty I had in finding a way to contact them, it’s likely they’ve been congratulating themselves on the absence of negative feedback.
Experience #2
Yesterday I went to a local music retailer to purchase a new case for my bass. This retailer is part of a very large national chain and while I try to support local retailers where possible, sometimes the purchasing power of a big chain is a good thing. I selected the case I wanted and carried it to the counter to complete my purchase. To my surprise, the salesperson took my credit card and put it in a circa-1970s credit card imprinting machine (!). It produced a classic rectangular slip with the full card number and expiration date imprinted on the receipt. I asked what happened to their regular (an much more secure) point of sale system. He indicated “some kind of maintenance” had crashed their POS system. Nationally.
It concerned me a little to have my credit card information floating around until they fixed their computers. After I signed my credit slip I asked what he would be doing with the retailer’s copy of the slip. Fortunately, the company had a protocol in place for such circumstances, and all hard receipts go directly to the safe. Once they are processed, the slips are physically destroyed. My concerns: (1) how could a national retailer implement a software update that hasn’t been thoroughly tested? (2) why wasn’t there a gracefull rollback available?