Are you making your customers “red in the tooth”?

Last week we began a discussion on the importance of producing great experience for our customers. Given the state and prevalence of technology and the rapidly changing competitive landscape, all businesses, no matter their size, have an obligation to invest in technologies that serve their customers, employees, vendors, and partners in ways that they value. I previewed that a recent transaction that I encountered was less than satisfactory. You can get caught up here.

My recent unsatisfactory experience.

This is personal. My parents are 92-years old. They both have been diagnosed with dementia. My wife and I responded to a crisis situation two weeks ago and dropped everything we had going on to travel from Georgia to Massachusetts to take care of them and get them ready to relocate to an Assisted Living (AL) community in Georgia. If any of you have ever done this, you know there are lots of moving parts and coordinations that have to happen prior to their relocation. There is no shortage of activities that are detailed and required.

One of those coordinations is to complete an on-boarding packet that provide volumes of personal, medical, and familial information to the Assisted Living staff. This information is very important as it helps the AL staff take care of their residents with quality and specificity - each resident has their own packet. These packets are required to give the staff the context(s) that either of my parents may be “in” as their journey through dementia progresses.

The need for the information is clear, this particular implementation of technology for collecting it was abusive to the user. I will not be naming the Assisted Living Community or the technologies employed, that isn’t the point.

Some more detail for you…

Each information packet is 45 pages long. It is a conglomeration of many different, individual forms. There is no way to save and return to complete the form if you are asked a question that you can’t answer. You must page through each field (there are hundreds for fields) or the form will error out and you have to start again. This digital customer experience was horrific. The community’s Sales Director apologized for the user experience before they asked us to fill it out - which obviously means they know it is a problem. They clearly don’t care enough to fix this for their customers. To me, this is inexcusable.

As mentioned above, there are lots of things that have to be completed prior to residents being admitted to this community. These forms aren’t the only things required - never mind the human aspect of preparing my parents for the trip and relocation - which will be jarring to them - especially in their condition. These on-boarding packets took 12 hours to complete - yes, 12 hours. The best case would have been 6 hours, but each packet errored out for different reasons at the end of the process - meaning we had to start again.

The Assisted Living community we have selected is beautiful. The staff seems wonderfully focused on the residents and the building/facility is new. With a price tag north of $10K per month…this on-boarding process wasn’t the experience that I expect at that price point.

If this digital experience was the first interaction we had with this business, I would have run away. And, while I am not running away, it does have me wonder if they really will take good care of my parents. Now I am less trusting of them than when we first met, not more trusting…which is a bad sign.

I plan to raise this situation to the attention of the Executive Director of the AL community. I’ll let you know how they react.

For my purposes today, I ask that you reflect on how you are treating your prospects and customers and how easy you make each interaction with them - for them, not you.

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