How not to enroll others in your process

My daughter's music school recently sent me a letter stating they were eliminating paper statements and required that we set up an online account. After too much effort and frustration, I now have set up the account. It only took about 10 failed attempts on their website, a trip to their business office, four e-mails, and a 20-minute phone call to finish this task. And my benefit is ... oh yeah, I get to receive electronic statements instead of mailed statements, twice a year. Lucky me.

Now that my gall has (mostly) subsided, I can see where this went off the rails. Whoever directed their process was focused on one outcome (security of student data) to the point of being unmindful of the larger outcome: successful enrollment of customers into their new paperless process. This is an all too-easy mistake. Here are the traps:

1. Not explaining the benefits of enrollment to customers. Academic institutions are not historically customer-focused, even when they are funded by their academic customers. In academia, enrollment just means getting on the class rolls. Customer enrollment requires selling an idea or process to others so that they want to sign up for it. After reading the school's two-page letter, I still didn't really understand why I should care or even participate. I understood that they wanted to eliminate their costs of printing and posting statements, and reduce their delays in receiving payment. But why should I care about that? Not considering the customer's perspective resulted in my starting the process with a grudging attitude. It went downhill from there. This is something to keep top of mind whenever you roll out a process, whether within your company or with your customers. Whatever your project's objectives, when you seek participation from others you have an obligation to enroll them. It isn't enough to direct them, even if they work for you.

2. Not providing all of the information required by the process. Their account set-up process required two pieces of data: an ID and an activation key. I understand they don't want to put both pieces of data in the same piece of mail for security reasons, and the letter contained the activation key. OK - then that's a problem to be solved, which they could have phrased this way: how can we make sure our customers have everything they need before they start the process? Had they sought to enroll customers in the process, this question would have come naturally; since that wasn't their stated outcome, it simply would not have occurred to them. In the end, this customer had to solve the problem: my husband drove to their business office to ask for the ID#. If the school were thinking about the customer's outcomes, they could have solved it easily and saved us a trip and the increasing aggravation. I could have been successful on the first attempt. They'd have me on their side.

3. Providing security keys in a font featuring ambiguous letters. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to validate the activation key, I began e-mailing their support desk. We tried to work out (unsuccessfully, in the end) whether one character was the number 1, the capital letter I, or the lowercase letter L. This issue is unfortunately all too common. Apple's iTunes gift cards suffer from the same issue: I almost never enter the ID codes correctly the first time because the typeface has ambiguous letters. Number 0 or letter O? It's just trial and error, since they have not considered the design of the type face from a usability perspective. I have to believe that for Apple, a company that is extremely design conscious, this is a manifestation of how much (or little) care is given to the customer's experience. I assume someone chose the font because they thought it looked cool. I now have an aversion to buying iTunes gift cards: it's not just the annoyance with having to retype a long random key multiple times; it's the resentment that I'm giving money to a corporation that really doesn't care about how annoying they can be to customers. You don't have to be Apple to make this mistake, and if your stated outcomes don't embrace the customer experience, you're likely to stumble too.

The fact that I dutifully worked through my issues in setting up the music school account will just reinforce with them the 'success' of their project. I have no doubt the project's metrics are aligned with their desired outcomes and not with their customers' experience, and I was aware of this all the way through the dreary experience. I just decided not to sweat it since my desired outcome is that my daughter continues her musical development. The experience just taught me that although I know her teacher also shares this outcome, the school probably does not. I now have an online account with them, but I'm not enrolled.