Bad Customer Experience is Expensive to Provide
The one where I nearly have a heart attack trying to stay fit
I have one of those health insurances that gives you rewards based on your activity (in the way a lab rat gets food if it completes a series of experiments in the right order).
Go for a run? Get points.
Go for a swim? Get points.
Stroll to the shop to buy a huge bar of Galaxy to eat whilst sat at your desk all afternoon? Get points.
This regularly leads to me walking around my living room late at night, trying to get my step count over 10,000 - surely the best example of the power of incentives you could hope to find.
But recently, it also gave me a brilliant example of ‘failure demand’ in organisations - or, in other why’s, why bad customer experience is really expensive to provide.
Given that I’m working so hard to get these rewards, you can imagine my dismay when I received my points statement and saw nothing recorded between August and October.
Had I simply sat and done nothing during the long hot summer months? Found a beach and stayed there? Worked from home, only leaving the room for ice cream? All possible, but on checking my diary, I could see that I had, indeed, made some physical movements over that two-month period.
As well as damaging my personal pride, these missing points had a real-world, financial impact. I get my Apple Watch through the insurance provider, and if you achieve a certain amount of points each month, you get the watch for free. However, if you don’t, you have to pay for it each month. So, my disappearing points were converting into disappearing money from my bank account.
I went onto their WhatsApp service, and from there, to a system to help people report and replace their missing points (suggesting this is obviously a regular occurrence).
After following a series of instructions, I uploaded screenshots of all my missing points – step counts, workouts, photos of me in gym gear looking convincingly sweaty. This took quite a while, so I recorded this as another workout.
48 hours passed, and I received an email from the team, telling me my data is invalid.
Followed by the totally unironic:
At this point, my Apple Watch buzzds to warn me that my heartrate was increasing to an abnormally high rate.
So, I decided to call the team. It was answered immediately and the person on the phone was wonderfully helpful. She asked me to download a screensharing app, viewed my phone, and took her own screenshots of the relevant data, with a promise to update it immediately.
And as promised, 24 hours later, the missing evidence of my highly average fitness regime reappeared.
Now, here’s the punchline.
I asked her why the points hadn’t been automatically updated.
‘You need to open and log in to the app every two weeks, otherwise it’ll stop recording points’
Let that sink in for a moment.
All of the time I wasted that week, because I don’t open my health insurance app every two weeks.
And for the business, all of that financial cost incurred as a result of a poorly designed system and application:
- The WhatsApp messages
- The ‘Missing Points’ System
- The person dealing with the email
- The time on the phone
- The screen-sharing system
- The person doing the manual updates
Failure Demand in action.
Often, businesses fail to realise how far back in the process they need to go to uncover the source of bad – and expensive – customer experience. Money is spent trying to deal with the problem, rather than uncovering and properly addressing the root cause. Each financial decision is looked at in isolation, rather than seen as a whole, and large investments are rejected, with no realisation that the many, smaller investments are costing more overall.
Of course, the biggest irony is this is an organisation set up to help me be more healthy – but due to the poorly designed processes, my stress levels are through the roof.