IT Failures

More and more processes are now handled by all-interconnected digital services. But despite doing this for many years now, the process failures resulting from infrastructure errors happen all too often. Or maybe this is just me and my bad luck. As it seems I would be one of the most valuable manual testers, as I tend to uncover all sorts of errors almost every day. 

What is interesting though is how companies react to these errors. There are three most common behaviors here:

1. We have not seen this error. An error is not an error unless a frustrated customer files a support ticket. So let's make the ticketing process difficult and we reduce the number of tickets even more.
2. Ah we are sorry this happened to you. Let's try once more. We don't really grasp all that I stuff and do not know how to avoid or fix the errors, but maybe if we retry the process it will work this time or the customer will not complain anymore.
3. We have zero error policy and we do go after any trace of an error. A smooth and seamless customer experience is fundamental to our business.

In my experience a good example of #1 is Lufthansa. Their IT infrastructure is really hopeless. This year alone they managed to lose my e-ticket (something I never considered possible) and I experience glitches almost every time I interact with their systems. E.G., they throw Access Denied on flight search results. This is a clear indication they no longer manage the infrastructure, which has started living a life of its own.

#2 happened to me recently when I arrived at an otherwise very nice boutique hotel in Georgia (US). The hotel emailed me a dozen of times a number of completely unimportant messages related to my reservation but failed to email me the room number and the door lock code (which BTW they promised to do a day before the check-in). Luckily a helpful staff member on site told me these vital details. But had I arrived late in the evening when there was no one to help, I would probably join the homeless guys on a park bench nearby. They "retried" sending the email several times but all I got was the useless marketing blurb, but no room/pincode information. Other guests did somehow checked in, so it must have been a bug I uncovered, but they did not have any idea on what went wrong and how to fix this.

Finally #3, which is a rarity, but a sign the company really has a grip on their IT and converts me into becoming a fully loyal customer for years. The example here is Wordpress. I had a rather benign issue I wanted to ask them about and following the web form links I ended up submitting a support request. Upon hitting "Send" all I got was "500 status code for POST". OK, forget it, I thought. And to my surprise they reached out tome on the next day:

We noticed that you tried to contact us on Friday 14th Oct but your request didn’t get through because of a technical issue on our end. We are really sorry about that. Please feel free to reply to this email if you still need help with anything.

This was a jaw-drop for me. Never expected a company to trace back their 500 to a live customer and trying to figure out if perhaps there was something important that customer wanted to tell them. Most companies would happily ignore the 500. Perhaps they would fix the root cause but going after all those who might have experienced the issue? That is extraordinary. Wordpress really stands out here and I do appreciate that. I'm reassured to be your committed customer.