A bad business practice award

I t never fails to amaze this writer that just when he believed he has viewed something really dumb a company will come out with a business practice even dumber. Recognizing the fact that in our era of instant communications some publicity might put a crimp on companies that irritate customers, this writer decided an award was called for. Thus, in this issue’s From the Editor column I will begin a periodic and hopefully not too frequent policy of acknowledging stupidity with my own Dummy Award. In this column I will present my Dummy Award to United Parcel Service. Let me explain. Earlier this year United Parcel Service introduced a new version of its shipping software that was distributed to approximately 200,000 customers. While the purpose of the software revision was to reflect rate increases on shipments, customers immediately began to notice an unexpected result. Whenever a customer would initiate their Web browser it would automatically be diverted to the UPS home page. In addition, if the customer examined their list of favorites, they would note the addition of several UPS-related Web sites. Unfortunately, UPS did not provide customers with any notification of changes that would occur, nor any option to avoid such changes during the software-installation process. While many customers could easily remove the changes with a minimum of effort, for other customers not familiar with browser operations a change back was a bit more challenging. In addition, some organizations had purposely configured employee browsers to access an intranet page upon startup and UPS software not now only caused a retro-fix, but, in addition, altered the distribution of corporate information until the retro-fix occurred. The UPS software demonstrates an all too frequent occurrence—a lack of consideration. In the past corporations, government agencies and academia took the appropriate view that the customer was right. Perhaps not always right, but their policy was to bend policy and rules that may have been too restrictive to favor the consumer when the situation warranted it. Today we are unfortunately viewing a shift in the opposite direction, with organizations failing to consider the consumer as they plan their activities. While my Dummy Award to UPS is in honor of their foul-up that was inconsiderate to their customers, there are probably numerous other organizations that deserve this award. However, instead of focusing upon my award the important thing to hopefully take away from this column is the fact that we need to place the customer back in the forefront of consideration. We need to once again not lose sight of the fact that the job of network managers and LAN administrators is to service their customers. As my Macon TV announcer would say, ‘That’s my opinion—what’s yours?’ —Gilbert Held