LOGICal eMOTIONs

Do You Trust On An Illogical Level?

// October 12th, 2007 // Brain Dump

[Time To Read: ~20min.]

This whole ongoing ordeal with LinkedIn and a comment my mother made a couple weeks ago regarding a disastrous launch of a CMS by a major Canadian company, got me thinking about some of these sites we seem to be using more and more…

Are we trusting these sites far more than we logically should be?

My first example is the Canadian company I mentioned earlier. This particular company decided that they would re-launch a particular division back last year (at least), yet through some of the most bizzare business practices, they have run exceedingly over budget, they have developed a CMS on the backend that makes one wonder “why bother?”, and they have nearly destroyed the most valuable commodity in business – trust.

See, this company had built into their old site a system where users could setup an account, and store certain information that could be referenced whenever the user wished. For some, vast quantities of information were stored within the system based on a certain level of trust in the company providing the service.

When the company decided to transition from the old system to the new system there was an undiscovered bug which mean that when the data was migrated, not everything went as smoothly as expected, and significant amounts of information were lost.

The result is now that this “new” site has been launched, users are logging into their respective accounts and discovering that information they have been adding to for years is no longer available.

Is the information lost forever? Well, it is anyones guess at this point. Theory would indicate that the information is still in the old system database… If it is not, then the information is lost forever and there will be a user backlash like they never thought possible. Now, on the other hand, if the information does still exist, someone has to locate it, verify it, and write some sort of process for moving over this data from the old to the new, yet skipping that which has already been moved. This will now take more time, and cost more money – added onto a project which in my best guess has already spent over $100,000 in WASTED WAGES that should have been avoided, and could have been avoided far too easily.

The key to this one is that Company A setup a system for users to store information and traded trust for user loyalty.

Where it gets quite interesting is that the re-launch of the site was originally planned for early this past year. After many, many, many delays the site was finally launched complete with loss of data. The users noticed it immediately and began the flood of emails to the front line individuals who add to and maintain the content of the site. The truly sad thing is that the trust level between company and client has been seriously damaged, yet it didn’t have to be this way!

For a little over a month the new system was on a development server while an immense mountain of bugs were frantically being worked out. The information had been migrated from the old system (which was still the public facing site) and it was discovered early on that not all the information had been migrated. Users were still using the old site, adding in information yet completely unaware that in 4 weeks time they would suddenly be faced with a new system complete with missing information.

Given the lack of marketing of this re-launch, my guess is that the plan was to suddenly launch the new site and all the users would be in the “Ooooh! Aaaah!” state and happy with the new site….

The front line individuals noticed that the information had not been moved to the new site early on (weeks before the actual launch), yet were unable to express the importance of having this information, the long term effect if it wasn’t there at the launch, and the fact that it needed to be high on the priority list.

The actual development team were doing their best at tackling challenges, however, without an actual project manager (I kid you not!), a language barrier, and the fact that they were running at about 150% capacity for months – it really doesn’t come as a big surprise that this became such a huge issue once the site was launched.

In terms of the site functionality, yes, it is a relatively small issue, HOWEVER, when looking at the long term impact on the company as a whole it then becomes a massive issue.

So is this now perfect 20/20 hindsight? For some it no doubt is – for others it is a situation filled with immense frustration which should have been EASILY avoided, and could have been.

Ok, so the information was moved over from the old system to the new system 4 weeks before the new system actually went live. It was also discovered (doesn’t matter by whom!) at that time, that not all of the information was migrated. With the re-re-re-re-re-scheduled launch of the new site now weeks away, why didn’t anyone let the users know that it would be a good idea to make a backup of their information because the site will be re-launched by X Date and that they cannot guarantee that everything will move over 100%?

This would have given their users weeks of time to go in to the old system (which was still being used), and make a copy of their information IN THE EVENT that something like this did happen. The reality is that it already DID happen and now they’re playing catch-up.

It truly baffles the mind. Here we have a large company, providing a service to their clients, their clients trusting the company, trusting the service, and in the blink of an eye, information that the client deemed worthy, stored on the company system (that they provided) is now gone with some of this information being irreplaceable.

So who is at fault? Both. That’s right, both parties are equally stupid, but for different reasons.

The front-line team knew that this information wasn’t migrated in its entirety and did everything in their power to express to the development team how critical this information was. Heck, the site has re-launched and they’re STILL making their case as to the importance of this issue.

Where it gets messy for the company is that they developed this information system and then promoted it to their clients as a safe and effective way for storing and organizing their information. They put their trust on the line in exchange for loyalty. We’re talking TRUST here people. The absolute, number one, and most valuable commodity in business! Through a history of action, it was implied that the information was going to be there and that their system could be trusted.

On the other hand, the users should have their heads checked as well… If you are using a system, provided by someone else, that you are not paying for, with no guarantees or service level agreement in place, and you simply trust a company with your information because they SEEM trustworthy – don’t bother crying when they lose your information and you don’t have a backup.

We are putting an incredible amount of trust in various companies every single day when we really need to be stopping to take a look at what is going on.

LinkedIn for example has suspended my account because of a stupid picture, and no, I’m not going on another diatribe about their horrible customer service. All I will say is that it is now the 5th day, 4 emails have been sent to them, and I finally got one back today saying that the restriction has been lifted, yet, it has not.

Back to my point.. LinkedIn dropped the heavy hammer on my account over something quite trivial, yet thankfully, if I was to be completely banned from the system, yes it would be an annoyance, however, I do have a backup of all +400 contacts.

Do I trust them? No. Can I trust that their site will always be accessible? Can I trust that I will always have access to my contacts? Can I trust that my information will not be wiped off their servers for whatever reason? Can I even trust that they will be in operation, tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year? No. Can you?

I believe at this point we are all getting better at guarding certain personal information, and companies are being forced to be better with it legally. Great, so I’m comfortable with Company X having a reasonable amount of my personal information. I might even go as far as to say that I trust they won’t sell it when they say they won’t. But does this mean implicit trust across the board?

Direct from the LinkedIn User Agreement:

You agree that LinkedIn may, with or without cause, immediately terminate your LinkedIn account and access to the LinkedIn Service without prior notice.

It’s pretty standard stuff, yet when we begin to place large value on the service provided (which is the goal for the company), and it is suddenly yanked out from under us – we have placed more trust in them than is logically deserved.

I’m going to cut this post there because at this point I think it is my biggest one yet. It could also split off and go down the customer service path far too easily. The big “take away” after all of this is simply: be aware of the level of trust you place in the companies you deal with. You are allowed to trust, and you should be able to trust, however, when something happens and you suffer a loss because you believed something that wasn’t necessarily true, it is you that gets to pick up whatever pieces are left.

Photo by blairware

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