Hi again after a long time!
I am back with some thoughts that just wanted to get out of me today.
Have you ever noticed what a difference communication can make – whether it is good or bad? We use communication everywhere and experience it in situations from spotting a fun ad to reading instructions, going through some automated processes to all kinds of customer service.
For me, good communication and hence communication skills are very important. Therefore also, I lose easily respect in people whose communication skills are not that well developed.
I believe that communication has a huge impact on so many aspects of life – whether it is building professional relationships, making friends, deciding which restaurants to visit or which web shops to return to. Nowadays there are also so many tools to facilitate communication, but it is still up to people to use them in ways that actually facilitate things instead of building extra barriers. This is an aspect of communication that I have worked mostly with this year, but that is perhaps a topic for another time. Today I want to talk about some concrete examples.
For example, I was planning to use today after a long time a nice service run through an app, but of course I didn’t remember my password. Who ever does!? They had made password recovery very easy – easy to find link just next to log-in window and the email to reset my password really arrived momentarily. I was so happy because sometimes I have to wait for those for hours and might just give up.
This is however where the good part ended. I clicked on the password reset link, filled in my new password and then faced an error message telling me to start over because the reset link had apparently expired. How? I had literally used it within a couple of minutes of requesting to reset my password.
I decided to try again, but after completing all the same steps, I came to the same result. And not many people – me included – are willing to do something again for the third time. Isn’t there a saying even among the lines of doing the same things and expecting different results is a sign of insanity?
As sad as it is, I cannot use the service today for sure and they lose out on my money. Losing a customer is as simple as that. And they might not even know this happened because I didn’t find an easy way to warn them. If I had, I would have given them some constructive criticism and that might have strengthened our relationship instead.
Can you recall a similar situation where communication changed everything?