Consumer Disconnect and your Big Company

I just spent 5 minutes surfing around T-mobile.com looking for a way to report two simple bugs on the website.  It won't recognize my consulting email address of @glhf.biz, which is the way I pay for my phone service there.  Secondly, their easy pay sign up isn't working, and hasn't been for me for the last 3 months.  After trolling around, and getting constantly redirected into phone FAQs and then the forums (where I have to create an additional account on top of my already logged in account?!?), I gave up on trying to let this company know they had a problem in their software.

I mean seriously, t-mobile has no way that I could find to just shoot off a quick message "Hey this webpage is busted just FYI".  Think about the value that is lost in that fact.

Now I can imagine a business analyst or perhaps a consultant sitting somewhere in the pretzel and beer decorated hallways of T-mobile corporate sitting down and looking at conversion rates on their Easy Pay (automated payment) system.  Perhaps they are drawing conclusions that consumers just don't like automated bill paying.  Perhaps this further reduces resources for that system and team due to an analyst decision, thereby moving support away from something the consumer really does want.  Perhaps this is one of many factors that leads to overall customer dissatisfaction with a brand.

I don't know, but I know I wanted to help and I gave up trying so I could make this blog post and rant about it and hopefully make another penny on my google ads traffic!

So, companies playing in any service-oriented space, especially the big boys and I guess I'm looking at you T-mobile, ask yourself this:

1. How easy are you making it for your consumers to express what they like and don't like about your product?  What percent of your consumer population will bother to call or take the trouble to register and post on a forum for issues large or small?
2. How many barriers of entry before a consumer can access a touchpoint at your organization and have a voice?  Why not allow effortless fire-and-forget commenting at any time from your customers to your CS staff?  
3. Why in the hell would you ask your customer to create and manage multiple sign ins to aspects of your service?
4. How many problems are you failing to address, and more importantly how many opportunities are you missing everytime a casual consumer voice isn't heard?

But hey, the myTouch 4G is still pretty sweet.