An area where a number of businesses and organisations can sometimes fail to integrate their online presence is in the detail of their back office activities.
Legacy systems or processes can often continue to be used without being adapted to take heed of the new ways in which the company or organisation does business. This is particularly true of business processes that require customers to handle paper-based forms. While these may have been honed to the nth degree over the years, the likelihood is that they now don’t make much sense if customers purchased online.
As usual and for illustration purposes, yours truly can relate a real life example of where five minutes of editing – or re-thinking - could make life easier for millions of people.
Last month, a red reminder arrived in the post. Time, it seemed, to do something about the TV licence renewal. As, apparently, you can no longer nip down to the Post Office to buy a TV licence, the browser was pointed to tvlicensing.co.uk to purchase same.
Now, for some reason that defies logic, you can still buy a black and white TV licence. Why? When was the last time anyone you know bought a black and white set, 1973?
Anyway, to my cost in pounds and hassle value, I discovered at the end of my credit card transaction that I had mistakenly selected a black and white licence. I suspected I had accidentally nudged the wheel on my mouse and this had changed my selection. Immediately, I took a note of the transaction number and emailed from the site explaining what had happened.
Three days later, I still hadn’t heard back so I decided to pick up the phone and unknot the whole thing with a real live person. The upshot was buying a colour licence and paying by credit card over the phone on the promise of having a hard copy licence posted to me. There was still, however, the little matter of a refund for the black and white licence.
While in most scenarios this would be but a formality, not so a credit card refund with the TV Licensing people. To get my money back for one of my two TV licences, I would have to wait until they posted me out a refund form.
This duly arrived in about a week. The enclosed form really wasn’t much help as it was completely geared to me having trotted down to the Post Office and left with a black and white licence in my hand. I couldn’t supply a licence number for this virtual black and white licence. Neither was there anywhere to enter the online transaction number nor the reference for the email I sent from their web site.
In the end, I completed the form as best I could and then wrote an explanatory letter to support my refund claim. It is now in the post, but with the distinct feeling that this refund isn’t going to happen without some more phone calls.
The real question posed by this form, perhaps, isn’t whether it needs updating, but rather its existence. In this age of web trading and e-government, the issue of a credit card refund should have been resolved with one phone call. The legacy form that was sent out was a TV licence refund application, not a form to enable a credit card refund.
New ways of doing business means new ways of processing and conducting it all levels. Not clinging to old processes and attempting to use them for purposes for which they were patently not designed. Updating existing paper trails to accommodate our online customers is one solution. Doing away with paper, on the other hand, will often be the cleaner, more logical move in a digital world.
As this TV licensing example has shown, picking and mixing online and legacy paper processes is half-hearted e-business that can – and does – create unnecessary work, is inefficient and to the end user, the customer, looks shoddy and inept.
