Potential, unintended consequences of customer journey transformation

It is important to balance the efficiency needs of the business with customer effort with user centric design and a friction free journey for all parties involved in the process.

And so the story begins…

Microsoft Outlook has a great feature...! 

It splits all of my emails automatically into 3 pots – without me asking for it...Focused, Other & Junk.

The problem with this is I now have 3 areas to go to review emails.

As I found out on Thursday night I had received a series of “important messages” via email from my the company I has selected for my car insurance, what had all been marked as SPAM and were in my JUNK folder. The last one was informing me that my car insurance had been cancelled as I had not provided my driving licence number and my wife’s who is also on my policy, as requested via the emails that I did not see.

I called my insurance company and then was greeted by the usual IVR, where I was able to navigate with DTMF (button press options) and spoken Voice commands. The voice commands did not work too well and required a fair bit of slow repeating…then throughout I was getting messages read to me about terms and conditions, which I was not sure I needed to hear for this particular enquiry and certainly not at this stage, when I just wanted to talk to someone to solve my problem.

I got through the IVR after 5 minutes to then join a queue where I was now greeted with a mix of music and on hold marketing messages.

I finally got answered by a person just over 10 minutes from when I dialled the number.

I explained the situation, I could not simply provide my licence number, or even email in my license number, or a photo of my licence over, as I also needed to follow a link from the email they were going to send me (which went to SPAM again) to DVLA website to get a code so they could validate the driving licence number I gave was correct with the DVLA.

I tried to provide the information online but as my policy had been cancelled. I have to wait 72 hours for an email from them as the information I have provided does not match what they have on file!?

So, this morning I will email over 2 driving license numbers and a code for DVLA so they can verify what I have said is correct.

After experiencing this journey it did leave me wondering if the balance between service provider efficiency and customer effort is as equitable as it could be, and what the impact could be on customer experience, satisfaction, renewal rate and NPS score? 

It also left me wondering what was the problem they were trying to solve, what options were considered, was the corresponding to be journey and unintended consequences understood of each options and if the journey was redesigned a different way, augmented with some additional technology would this solve the problem in a better way?

Interesting muses for a Saturday morning :)