How web design needs to change utility companies

There are any number of blogs and, more specifically, people around discussing the finer points of web design at all levels, from low-level technical matters to high-level interface interactions. The Web is excellent, largely, at self-analysis, reconceptualisation and experimentation – it could, of course, be better, but it’s true to say that the dominant idioms on the web today have undergone a trial-by-fire that would be hard to match in the offline world. The web is a world of knowledgeable amateurs, not restrained by technology, or financial costs (much), but by ideas, and strong ideas rise to the top fast. The Web is also immature in many ways, and this will continue to happen as long as the value of web applications is measured purely in the crude terms of usage numbers or VC funding rounds – what goes up can go down (or worse, stagnate) just as quickly. I wish that people would more often follow Alasdair Gray’s maxim, “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”, an exhortation written for Scotland (it’s inscribed in one of the walls of the new Scottish Parliament) that can be applied in a comparable fashion to the new world of the Web.

The first thing that the Web needs to backwards-bequeath onto 20th century modes of thinking is the primacy of idiosyncratic interfaces over monolithic ones. I used to work on the phones doing outsourced customer service work for O2 (the UK mobile network), and very often someone would fax in a formal letter, following all the conventions of the venerated form, and we had no means to respond in kind – most of the time, in fact, these faxes, rendered barely legible by inkjet cartridges the company was slow to replace, were completely ignored. If you run a classical filing system, and have in-trays and out-trays, and actually have the power to respond in kind, it’s clear how to deal with a fax. But in a world where arbitrary pieces of work can be packaged up and sent down the wires to some other company the other side of the world employing people whose first language is not yours and who are only granted an extremely limited scope of responsibility and ability to communicate, a formal letter isn’t going to get far any more unless it’s aimed at the CEO.

Communication with companies never used to be so hard. We’re clearly going through an interregnum where the old mode of communication with, say, a utility company, has been shattered, yet there’s not a replacement idiom that’s worthy of the name. If you have a serious billing issue with a company such as British Gas, my experience is that it will take you at least a few months before you get anywhere at sorting it out with them. I know few people who would describe such companies as anything better than criminal. If British Gas was a person, someone would have been granted power of attorney over it by now on the basis that it was showing signs of severe synaptic breakdown. Yet we still have to deal with them to heat our flats and houses!

Take my current issue with my broadband provider, Tiscali. Reading my bank account a couple of months ago, I saw that they had re-opened the ADSL account I had at my old address and were charging me for two accounts concurrently. So I sent them a note on their ‘Contact Us’ form on their website informing them of the problem. There was a drop-down on the form where you could specify the topic, and the closest one seemed to be “Broadband” (they do phone and TV packages as well). First email I get back: this email has come through to Broadband helpdesk, whereas Billing & Admin are best placed to deal with it, so we’ve passed the email on. Why did I want to know that? I just wrote on their contact form – it’s not my fault if I picked what they think is the wrong “topic”. Second email I get back: we don’t have your postcode, account details, etc – please provide them. I was logged in to the Tiscali site when I submitted the form – they already had a context there to grab my personal info. I provide the relevant account numbers to be told that their helpdesk can’t sort the issue out and I need to telephone in. Telephone in? Why provide customer service by email if it can’t do anything?

So I reply and ask why this is, and the email is sent on to the “Finance & Admin” team who will apparently respond within 48 hours. Four days later there’s no email, so I send a quick email asking whether there’s any response, which is construed as a complaint, all types of which I’m assured Tiscali takes very seriously. Then Finance & Admin respond that they have already looked into my case and found I only had one account. I respond, copying in the part of the previous email where I gave them the two account numbers, and a miracle happens – a lady phones me up on my house number (not the mobile number I gave in my emails, but never mind) and admits that there have been two concurrent accounts, in error. So what is she going to do about it? I would have to call up the Cancellations department to get the account cancelled, and then call up Billing to get the amounts credited off and my bank account refunded. You call them, I said. You already have all the information you need to sort the matter out, and you admit that I’m owed money. So you know what to do. By getting me to call these numbers you’re getting me to do your job for you. I pointed out – it’s always necessary, and working in an outsourced call centre speaking to people from a country different from your own is tough – to her that she’d been about the most helpful person yet, and that this was the fault of the company and not her. She then did a strange thing, which was to credit £10 to my account as a “goodwill gesture”. It’ll cover what they owe me in interest, at any rate! But as a response to me refusing to phone them again (twice) and threatening to get all my money back immediately with a direct debit indemnity claim (which I promptly did), the response is to throw money at me as an apology, as if that makes it all better! It should be amazing that a company will authorise their outsourced agents to pay their customers off sooner than authorise those agents to contact other people within the company who are equipped to get particular things done.

That said, such a thing is normal, right? It shouldn’t be.

Taking Amazon as the archetypal Web company that provides, at its centre, non-Web services, can you imagine them telling you to phone them twice after you’d emailed them with a support query? It’s unthinkable. The reason is that they understand the primacy of the interface between them and their customers. It’s stayed more or less the same all the way through its history. In many ways, it is defined by its Web interface. You can imagine the logistical challenges that were involved in growing Amazon up, but you don’t ever see them. You’ll never be told you contacted the wrong person. Not to hold Amazon alone up here, but I’m making the point that the Web should change our expectations. You should be able to think of any company that operates on the Web as one big efficient and organised person.

When I worked for O2, I’d have to give people the numbers of other departments many times a day. “Can’t you just put me through?” “‘Fraid not, sorry.” “I was told this was the right department.” “I don’t know why you were told that, and I’m sorry.” The thing one would do most, working that job, was apologise. My macro’d emails from Tiscali mostly comprise apologies of various hues, and little by way of substantive help. Stop apologising, and stop handing out “goodwill gestures” that will only stop me shouting quite so much. Trust your workers, allow them to communicate freely. Hire them according to higher standards (Zappos‘ policy of paying employees $1,000 to quit after their initial training makes a ton of sense). Genuinely value them. Here’s an important one: listen to them. They’re speaking with your customers all day every day, so they know them a lot better than you do. So listen to them. Don’t do as O2 did and pay some ridiculous marketing company in London vast sums to process a completely unmethodical survey that will only point up what you want it to. Do you really think your workers are significantly dumber than you? Clue: they’re not. Don’t force them to sit and apologise for you all day just because you don’t get it.

It’s still amazing to me that automated telephone systems still don’t give you useful feedback when you call them. “Your call is important to us.” It’s a cultural cliché that would have been lanced in a handful of months in the Web world. “We are experiencing especially high volumes of calls right now.” The increased use of the sentencelet ‘Sorry for the wait there’ when getting through to an agent, even if there wasn’t in fact a wait at all. (I’ve even had that one at a supermarket checkout – I know how queues work, OK?) When I’m waiting to get through to you, provide me with some feedback that’s actually useful to me! Say where I am in the queue! I’ve only been in one such telephone queue, and that was over six years ago. Such a feature should slay, but it hasn’t! Such a small thing, so much less annoyance! Why is no-one talking about this? I may have heard discussion of the subject on the Rissington Podcast, or maybe I was imagining things? Still, the state of these telephone systems in 2008 is still one big anti-pattern.

The Web doesn’t just include the Web – it provides new synapses between that which is real, and we should look to it and re-model interactions that happen off the Web in ways developed on the Web. We’re in the early days of a nation of everyware, and the Web is gaining primacy. It’ll soon be unthinkable for a company to ask their customer to call two different numbers to sort out an issue that is the company’s mistake. It’s now only unacceptable. Utility companies should realise that, and change now.