Who’s responsible to make things clear to customers?

Is it wrong that many essential things in life are too complicated to do without hiring assistance?

On several occasions over the past months, I have received comments from readers about challenges they have faced getting services or sorting out their personal lives. The issues they’ve faced have included gaining clarity on health care coverage and altering legal documents after a spouse’s death. But they also have been as simple as trying to change cable television or cell phone service.

With the simpler items – cell and cable TV service – the challenge dealt with being placed on hold for interminable amounts of time before finally being connected with a human being who was knowledgeable enough to assist.

With the more complicated items, the solutions were far more involved and have taken months to sort out. In the case of the health care coverage, it took a reader months before a representative at a hospital billing office acknowledged that the hospital had incorrectly filed insurance claims for coverage. With the legal documents, the reader was finally advised to attend an online webinar to walk him through the process of filing documents. In spite of a glimmer of hope that fixes are at hand, each is yet to be resolved.

Each reader expressed feeling both frustrated and ignorant by not being able to figure out how to get done what they were hoping to get done. The frustration was added to in each case by the organization not swiftly trying to assist when the challenges arose.

Organizations might promise customers that most of their questions or problems might be more simply resolved by using the organization’s website or a smartphone app, but too often these options result in adding another layer of confusion. Getting through to a knowledgeable human being becomes an even more distant possibility.

It’s not much solace to reassure a frustrated reader that what they are going through is not likely a result of their ignorance of anything other than what the organization has not made clear to its customers. Trying to convince a reader that many have been through similar situations and that ultimately – with a lot of time and diligence – all will get resolved also falls on weary ears.

There’s a sense among these readers that an organization’s ultimate goal is that the customer will just give up. That’s unlikely the case given that in many cases the organization stands to gain more business if their customers could just figure out how to do business with them.

If an organization has a customer advocate, that’s often a good person to ask for to assist in navigating a solution. But if organizations truly want to attract and retrain customers and to gain new business when these customers make recommendations to friends, the right thing is to put a pause on efforts to automate or create layers of red tape and to spend time figuring out how to make it as simple as possible for customers to find resolution to whatever it is they are trying to get done. They also might hire a good editor to make sure that any written instructions are worded as simply and clear as possible.

It is not unreasonable for customers to expect to be able to do business with the people with whom they have been paying to do business.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

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