I was trying to renew my postbox a few days back after receiving an SMS from the Postal Service informing me that it was about to expire and I would lose it if I did not remedy the situation immediately. As I am out of town I decided to use the Virtual Post Office option, for which the link was included conveniently in the SMS. After trying to register, and being told I was already registered, and clicking back to recover my password I was presented with this beautiful piece of Introduction to Programming 101.

This made me think about a conversation I had with my partner earlier on in the day about a competitor who is trying to muscle in on her clients by trying to convince her clients that they are the future with his piece of outdated tech which in fact does more harm than good in the B2C industry. After reviewing the competitor’s options I realised, that much like their other services, this was just a bad attempt at implementing a, according to them, “New Tech” which is revolutionising customer experience.

As a veteran developer, I have seen many things in this industry and the most annoying of them all is when low or zero skilled people are given projects and take clients because they bullsh*t clients into believing they are capable of more than they actually are or they present products which neither the salesman nor the client understands. And if the solution actually ends up functioning it is normally riddled with bugs and security holes or just badly coded, as seen with our virtual post office. Most of the time, however, the solution fails to deliver and the client writes off the channel completely instead of realising that the idea was great but they were just ill-advised by an uninformed inexperienced salesperson or newbie developer. And all these people do is make it that much harder for those of us who know what we are doing and are able to provide solutions that meet expectations.

If you are one of these people, either educate yourself to a point where you understand the client requirements and actually provide a working solution, or find something else to do. The software/marketing industry is not for everyone and there are no simple solutions.

If you are a business owner or tasked with marketing budget or IT expenditure, make sure you are informed about the decisions you make and use companies with a track record of providing CX/UX centric solutions that actually deliver!