OddThinking

I’ve been having a horrible couple of weeks trying to deal with various bits of software (in the broad sense, including web-sites, IVRs, business processes and the like) that are terribly broken.

It is not merely coming across show-stopping software bugs that have been causing me despair.

No, what has been exasperating me madly is the number of broken support channels that prevent me from escalating the error. It has left me feeling depressed that not only is my life more dependent on crappy software than ever before, but there is no hope that the software I depend on will ever improve.

Stepping carefully away from any mention of my employer’s business, I’ll mention some of the items unrelated to work:

• I went to the web-site of a financial institution to find out some basic transaction details about my account. Listing the transactions on the account isn’t on of its features. I used the web-mail feedback form to politely voice my disappointment. What should I do when I encounter this error on someone else’s website?

  An error occurred on the server when processing the URL. Please contact the system administrator.

• I downloaded a free trial of some software that contacted the vendor’s license server to confirm I was still entitled. Except the connection failed, with a meaningless error. I contacted the helpdesk to manually get approved. Except the helpdesk had shut for the night five minutes earlier. Despite having the best intentions to trial the software and purchase it if it was good enough, I actually found myself searching the web for warez – a cracked version of a free trial so that I could actually trial it.
• The other day a service web-site was faulty. I tried to report the problem, and failed. I tried to report the problem with the problem reporting system; I was contacted by a representative, who proceeded to close off my tickets without taking any action. I was then sent a customer survey form. I tried to use it to report the problem with the problem reporting system for the problem reporting system. I hit the Back button during the survey and it threw away all my edits. I gave up far too late.

It sounds like I have been a belligerent whinger, but most (not all, but most) of the time I have been polite, and hopeful that if someone understands the pain that they are causing their customers, they might do their best to remove it.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been forced to lower my expectations.

I am finding, to my horror, that I was pleased today that I could successfully report that an IVR was hanging up on the customers who selected the wrong option. Successfully reporting a bug is now my idea of a productive morning!

I was pleased yesterday because I was able to get a user account for some software with only two telephone calls and six prompts from an IVR. The fact that the software then locked up on the two machines that I tried it on barely lowered my sense of achievement.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on the ground in frustration while you wait in the queue to talk to an unhelpful staff member to get the phone number to call to record your complaint about how the web-site won’t let you report a support channel problem you had while using a crappy software product — for ever.