Change Your Name

Posted on December 28, 2006 by John Hunter

Best Buy Asks Man To Change Name [the broken link was removed]:

Turns out if your last name is less than three letters, the online sign-up isn’t an option for you.

Companies often put up barriers for no reason, then leave customer service agents to try and explain. And then this happens:

When he called Best Buy one customer service agent even suggested he change his name

Now that is great 🙂

Charles Yu: “I said well, I think that is a little ridiculous – I don’t want to change my last name just to sign up for this.”

When 7 On Your Side contacted Best Buy, the company apologized for the problem saying… “We were aware that our online system for creating Reward Zone accounts does not recognize a name with less than three letters and the decision has already been made to correct it.” The company went on to say they have no definite timeline for the fix…

My advice. Don’t create stupid restrictions (in IT systems or otherwise). What do you care how long people’s names are? There are many people with 2 character names.

Also, have customer service personnel who are trying to improve the system, not trying to get the customer off the phone to meet some arbitrary numerical target. Most often the representatives seem most concerned with getting you off the phone. An effective system to discover what needs to be improved is not something that management has bothered to design into the system. Big mistake.

Once Best Buy found out the media was onto the story they would have to be pretty lame not to realize telling a customer to change their name was going to make them look pretty stupid. So the marketing guy does say they are going to fix it now. But the “change your name” comment is the feeling that many companies give with their IT systems and “customer service centers.”

I called Canon when I had a problem with my new Camera. Cannon was great.. But normally calling is just a waste of time. Canon provided good service, but I don’t know to what extent they were gathering data to change the system to eliminate the problems people call about. I would imagine Cannon is given their long quality improvement history.

Related: Our Policy is to Stick Our Heads in the Sand – Usability Failures – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus

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