Everything is digital these days.  I know, I know; I sound like an old man…perhaps shaking his fist and yelling at clouds.  And of course it’s an exaggeration.

And I’m not talking about how even traditionally brick-and-mortar brands allow you to order their goods online and have them delivered to your home.  Nor do I mean that even my dentist has a website nowadays (I had to throw in the word “nowadays” to keep my old-man cred).

What I mean is that there are brands like Uber, Rover, and Vrbo that are organically and only online entities.  They are completely digital in the sense that, sure, they may own assets like office space and servers somewhere, they exist only in the ether.  They’re all code.  Amazon would be one like that, except that it owns all that inventory and all those warehouses and trucks and such.  And think about companies like DoorDash…that’s a fully online company that removes the need for you, its user, to have to go to a traditional brick-and-mortar location.  Maybe it’s safer to say that everything’s a service?

Anyway, I recently had an experience with one of these online-only organizations (not any of those listed above, but just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about).  As I said, these companies basically are code:  they have an app or a website (or both).  You go on there, open an account, pay for something, and get it.  Like the above examples of Uber, Rover, Vrbo, and DoorDash, a lot of times their main aim is to be the middleman for and connect you with someone who has something you want (a ride somewhere, a place to stay, etc.).  The business model is to streamline the finding of those connections (usually through a marketplace of some sort) and enable the transaction (usually where they get their cut by either charging you or the provider—sometimes both—a little bit for the service).

Again, that’s all done with code.  Someone’s written a program and ‘put it out there’ in an app store and/or on a website.  That’s all they do.  They don’t walk your dog or take you somewhere or create (and often don’t even ship) any of the goods you purchase.  They just code.

I bring all the coding up to set the stage for my recent interaction.  Since it’s code, there are always glitches and issues with the technology.  I don’t really mean “always,” but what I mean is that those glitches are inevitable.  If you’re an intolerant and impatient Customer who expects everything to always go smoothly and there never to be a digital hiccup, well, what can I tell you?  Welcome to the real world.  And in general, yes, we rarely come across too many issues when we use a reputable integration brand like those mentioned here.  But somewhere, sometime, someone’s going to have an issue.

And so I did.

There was a weird incident using this particular marketplace app and I simply didn’t feel comfortable with how it went down.  I wanted to re-attempt the purchase (it’s one of those where people put up things for sale and this brand acts as the clearinghouse…they’ve got a seller as a user on one end, and me, the buyer as a user on the other).  Please just refund me and I’ll go right back in and try it again as I’m sure it was just a random glitch.  I’m not demanding my money back or declaring that ‘I’ll never use this platform again!’… I just want a reset, ante, and then I’ll take another shot at it.

Here’s the thing:  The Customer Service experience was abominable.  Just atrocious.

The IVR was a mess; the hold time was egregious; the agents were unempowered; and, worst of all, the actual policy was not only muddled, but as far from Customer-centric as you could get.  Escalation was a disaster, and when I finally got to someone with the authority to do what I wanted, I still hit a mountain of resistance and was made to feel as though they were doing me a huge favor to help get things straightened out.

All-in-all, this was the opposite of the old story of how sometimes your recovery from a bad situation ends up enhancing Customers’ perception of you than it would have been without the problem in the first place.  Here I’d never had a problem with the system before (I’ve been a pretty loyal user of this marketplace and, as I’d said, was happy to keep with it and try again but just please refund me so I can), and even though I will likely continue to use them, they’re definitely quite diminished in my eyes.  Not because they had a glitch in their system (again, that’s inevitable for a company born and only existing in code), but because they don’t seem to recognize that, since it truly is inevitable, they’ve got to invest in their recovery systems.

Glitches are unavoidable.  Horrible CX isn’t.