I’m currently at the One Utama, Starbucks Coffee outlet with my lil ol white Apple Macbook. While waiting for my girlfriend, I expected to logon to the free wireless normally provided by Timezone. It was after buying a drink, finding a comfy one seater sofa and sipping on their signature hot chocolate and trying to connect to the Wi-Fi did I notice there wasn’t Time available here. Bummer!
I had 2 options which was to either sign up an Airzed account or a TMNet Hotspot account. Both are premium services and I’ve never really believed in signing up for anyone of it. My reasoning is if you’re a customer, you’re technically ‘paying’ for the usage of their Wi-Fi. Nonetheless I have around 1 hour to kill so I decided to might as well register with one.
Being positive, I checked out where these new accounts could be utilized fully. Both Airzed and TMNet offered almost the same number of locations for me to utilize the connection. In the end, I ended up signing up with Airzed although I’m already running TMNet at home and I would actually expect the TMNet connection to be better.
So what made me sign up with Airzed instead if I know TMNet would give me a better connection?
The reason is very simple. It was because the TMNet sign up mechanism wasn’t working on my Apple notebook. Due to that, TMNet lost a potential customer who’s actually using their service at home but won’t be using their service for a month. The Airzed lowest plan is a monthly unlimited plan – connection is upto 1Mbps depending on location.
This example for lost of business is the reason I’ve continued to write in this blog. It’s not just about telling people the lousy experiences customers actually go through in websites but the cause for lost of business when the website isn’t executed well.
Someone could reply this isn’t considered a lost for TMNet since they’re monopolizing the home broadband market at the momnet, but what is happening is due to poor execution is setting up the website the company has lost business.
Imagine if you’re running an e-commerce website, your hired designer, developer or company who built your website merely tested on the Windows platform and worst scenario, only in the Internet browser; Internet Explorer (IE). Now think how much lost is there if 80% of your customers are using an alternative browser to IE.
Therefore in this industry of building websites today, it isn’t merely having strong aesthetic value but the support for alternative Internet browsers and even user-friendliness. I say user-friendliness because Airzed allowed me to sign up and access the Internet in less than 10 minutes.
So if you own a business website, one of the reasons you’re only profiting 20% might be because your website isn’t supporting 80% of your customers.
What Internet browser are you using now?
I believe there’s a general problem with this and not just TMNet per se. You see, most of the people who DOES care about compatibility issues are people with technical knowledge like us AND ALSO HAVE A DOMINANT GEEK SIDE.
Nevermind how dominat that geeky side of yours is, but it’s when such geekiness kicks in that you start complaining how sites don’t work etc.
for businesses, it’s great for them to just go in, identify the problem, build the websites, show it to the boss on IE(still the major % of browser market) and wah lah, job done, deal closed! get what i mean?
actually, this is also a problem when i read up digg.com. most of the articles are just so geek speaks!
my two cents
You’ve proven my case that the development of credible CE (customer experience) models is almost non-existent in large companies here.
I think the issue of browser compatibility is just one weak link in the chain among many. Even if it works but the payment mechanism cocks up, they also lose the sale. As would bad packaging, customer policy, etc etc. Every single thing that builds on the customer’s experience effects the outcome. Even the URL.
Many website operators don’t realize that a website that conducts online sales and delivery magnifies the state of the company’s operational health many times over. Every small mistake and ommission is globally visible, reported on, blogged about, taken advantage of, and played over and over again by customer and competitor alike.
The funny thing is that these companies are blind to the web’s nasty habit of revealing their internal inefficiencies. You still get messy online registration, badly updated information, missing orders and poor service delivery. Instead of being a company’s best friend, the internet can be its biggest enemy.
The question is do these companies care. If they have more customers (and problems) than they can handle, what’s one dissatisfied customer. This is the unfortunate reality.
Just accept the fact that non-IE users are minorities; Just slighlty above non-Windows user and it will probably stay that way for a very long, long, time. ;)