Today, I received a call from my credit card company. They notified me that my balance (which is set up for auto-pay) was overdue and were wondering if I'd like to set up a payment. I was pretty mad about the situation because I set up automatic payment to avoid any late payments and I know it's pretty much impossible to remedy the situation once they ding your credit. I started to explain this to the guy, and the call promptly dropped. After calling back two more times, I was informed that I would only be allowed to pay a small portion of my bill today via their online systems, and I would have to wait 15 days to pay the remaining balance. Additionally, they agreed that the finance charges and late fees were unfair, but claimed to be unable to do anything about them until the balance was paid in full. Finally, they were unable to explain why the payment stopped working and/or when it might start working again. This got me thinking. Why are so many things like this such a big pain?
I've never worked for a bank, but I have worked for various groups of people that deliver online services, not unlike those that I blame for a large portion of the problems I experienced this evening. Sadly, I have to admit that these things are actually intentionally designed to limit the ability for a user to do what they want for various different reasons. Here are a few I've heard...
- it would be insecure
- the customer might possibly do something they don't actually want if we let them do that
- we might get sued by the customer for allowing them to do that
- I don't think the customer would want it to work like that because I don't
I have always been a strong opponent of arbitrary limitations and guessing what the end user wants, but it seems like it's always a losing battle. Why must this be? When will service organizations return to their mission of
serving the customer instead of making them want to stab their eyes out with a rusty screwdriver?
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