I've yet to understand how things that are just brain dead easy, take on live's of their own, thus providing endless reams of cannon fodder for guys like me.
Consider the Hilton Honors web site. You have the option of searching for a hotel by City, Airport, or State. In the example below, I selected Airport. In the case of Airport, the site wants -like most travel sites- the three letter code for the airport; in my example DFW for the Dallas Forth Worth International Airport.
I type that in, set the search for 5 miles, ignore the state/country and give the system my dates.
<boom>
Check out the ridiculous error message that pops up. For even more laughs, put in Yukon as the Province with Canada as the country. You guessed it, you will get the hotel listing for the DFW airport. It correctly understands DFW airport. You can put in "LHR" (Heathrow in London, UK) and put Texas/USA as the State/Country or just use Finland. It doesn't matter so long as the airport code is correct.
I found this little goof by accident six months ago and I've been trying to find the actual programmer/human that did this. I want to fly to wherever they are, show him or her this goofy programming error, and just stare at them while the excuse flies out. Missed in beta testing? No test case for fill one out, not the other(s)? No flow diagram that would catch this?
It's not about the error, actually. It's about the process. Nobody appears to own this problem. Nobody in support, marketing, 'the front office' appears to have a clue on how to get this problem in front of a programmer to fix. I know I am not the only person who's seen this and I am quite sure I am not the only person who has mentioned it via feedback, etc. Yet, here it is in all her glory. The "new" web site with this glaring flow problem still in place.
Lesson for you: Keep lines of communications open. Your user base is going to find stuff like this so make it easy for them to contact you. When you get contacted, have a process in place to address and follow up. You will have a better product/service, people in your company who won't loose touch with the users, and your company will comes off as one that at least listens.
Honestly for a non-tech company this is much harder to catch than you would think. Even in a three person company.
Just found a bug where a large company's web service would puke on "FT." but was happy with "FT" as in Fort Worth. You'd think they could just strip out ".". But no they respond back with the closest match. Most end users don't see the difference.
Boring story cut short, any programer might not think of that issue during testing but should catch onto it fast when reported. The problem is getting the right messages to the techs. A small company can't afford to have developers full-time on customer service. You also can't afford to have every site use issue float back to the development team. There are a lot of clueless people out there. Yet these small 5 second fixes could be blocking large revenue or annoy loyal customers (like your issue).
Solution: Like you said communication. Give it time and encourage dialog. So get all the "maybe" tech issues to flow back to the dev team. If it isn't a bug then they can communicate back to service why it isn't a bug. Meanwhile the dev should track this as an area for improvement. If it is a really issue, fix it asap, communicate back to the customer, and reward them for the find. Communication also means frequent analysis of logs and site abandonment patterns.
Fixing these little issues quickly add up to a real money and happy users.
Posted by: Chris | December 08, 2007 at 16:28
Rick - I used to be marketing director for Thrifty.com. The person you're hunting for is Tucker Tyler out of Memphis.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/110/616 is his LinkedIn profile.
Bet you'll get some traction this way.
Cheers, Gerald Buckley, Tulsa
Posted by: Gerald Buckley | December 18, 2007 at 13:33