If they’ve really got a problem, they’ll keep trying, right?

I’m not going to name the guilty party.

Company X (no, not that X!) is our broadband provider – and in fact the actual service they sell is very good. The connection is very fast and it rarely falls over.

However…

On those occasions when I have to get in touch, they are genuinely awful, to the extent that you wonder how they manage to stay in business.

There is what they amusingly call a ‘customer portal’ to do account management stuff, but it’s so poor that you wonder if it was a project given to a secondary school pupil on a work placement.

Last week an issue cropped up which required me to ‘raise a ticket’, as we IT folk like to say to confuse normal people instead of referring to ‘reporting a problem’.

I did this by completing a form on the customer portal, which in turn generated an email to me confirming receipt of the message.

This email contained a bunch of useful links on setting up an additional router, making payments, etc – none of which was relevant to my problem.

I was about to delete the email when I noticed the following text right at the bottom:

Hopefully, you have found the answer to your query. If you have not, please reply to this email, just let us know your original query is still outstanding and we will get back to you. Otherwise, we will not see your email. 

Eh? I had an issue; I checked your FAQs; I didn’t find anything; so I raised a ticket. Which you ackowledged, but then in the small print you ask me if I’m really, really sure I still have a problem…?

Tech CEOs: this is not how you delight your customers!

It’s not what we do here at Marked Improvement. We’re not perfect BUT we do our best to keep channels of communication open with our clients so if there’s a problem, we hear about it and can address it as soon as possible.

It’s true that we’re a small team (although we do have more than 100,000 registered users across all our platforms) and support gets more difficult as you scale up.

But there’s no excuse for designing in communication barriers like this.