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Opinion
Stupid Forms and Other Communications
8/3/2006
FedEx Manager: “I have your wife’s account right here in front of me.”
Not a good start to the conversation. Luckily, it seems to have ended okay. By the time it was over I knew that (a) the account had been closed – even prior to my call, and (b) the manager thinks we won’t be bothered again.
What I think happened is that when I mailed the invoice back with a query written on it, the fact that it was a query kicked out an automated form. (The one I object to so much.) Then, someone actually read what I wrote, determined that it was not my wife’s account and cancelled it. However, the query response form had been already sent.
You would think that there’d be a note for the customer service guy who I first spoke to somewhere in the system, but nope.
Your university or college would not design forms like that on purpose, surely. However, you may have some unintentional ones out there. I hope that when communications processes, data processes, and the sending to and fro of forms processing is designed on your campus, there is some integration involved in the planning. It’s always nice if someone g'es through the whole flow and knows what the invoice has on it, and that matches what the computer records say, and that customer service looks at the same data, and that you are not asking people for information you already have printed on the form you are using to ask them.
I’m sure that no one on your campus is guilty of what I suspect to be the case at FedEx. Maybe its intent is to reduce second-tier follow through on complaints. I wonder what percentage of “fall offs” of complaints FedEx gets when it sends out that query response form?
Maybe it was very well designed, after all?
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