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Sorry is the easiest word

The hard part is admitting you have a problem at all.

Jon Tullett
By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 22 Oct 2014

Last week, I bought a domain from domains.co.za. Not my usual choice of registrar, but I had my eye on a vanity domain at one of the more obscure top level domains. Domains.co.za checked the domain was available, took my money, and set up the registration. Then discovered a day later that, oops, the domain wasn't actually available after all, and would I like a credit for a different domain instead?

To be fair, the company corrected the mistake quickly and no harm was done - I requested a refund instead and they agreed without quibble. I have no beef with domains.co.za, but it did highlight a couple of issues that have come up often enough with local online retailers that it starts to look like a trend, so here it is.

What caught my eye was, firstly, that it feels rather irresponsible for a registrar to sell a domain that isn't actually available - that's the sort of thing that leads to nasty disputes when it's a particularly in-demand title. And secondly, the company's excuse, when I pointed that out, was that the whois server for the TLD in question was down, so they couldn't verify the domain was available.

If you can't verify something exists, maybe you shouldn't sell it. Just a thought.

The episode reminded me of a similar incident a couple of years ago. I purchased an e-book from Kalahari, and after several days of no e-book, was informed the company was terribly sorry, but the e-book was out of stock so it would issue a refund.

Out of stock? How do you run out of something you can make infinite copies of? And how does it take a week to find that out?

I appreciate that inventory management is, well, not a complicated job, but a demanding one. The shift from offline batch updates to real-time stock control is a challenge that many of our local retailers have been struggling with as they move to the Web. They're solving a problem that their international counterparts tackled, oh, 15 or 20 years ago, but let's not quibble. It's a challenge and they're doing their best. But that's physical inventory. Actual stuff on shelves, subject to complicated warehousing and picking and returns and all the rest of it. A domain is either available or it isn't. You either have a licence to sell an e-book or you don't. No one has to go check a shelf or scan a bar code to find out that kind of information.

Fix the fault

But, if you've made such a basic mistake, just fix it. Don't try to explain it away with paper-thin excuses - that's just compounding the problem. Take responsibility, don't blame a third party, even if it genuinely was someone else's fault - it's still you the customer had a bad experience with, and you're basically just highlighting that you didn't have a process to deal with a supplier breakdown. Not a winning message, that.

That brings me to my second complaint, and one which has played out in numerous other instances (don't get me started on banks and ISPs): don't assume your customer is an idiot, or at least hopelessly ignorant. No, you hadn't run out of my e-book. If a whois server is offline, don't assume every possible domain is available. Most of all, don't make up excuses hoping your customer will be technically illiterate enough not to spot the nonsense - you may have decent odds of being right, but those odds are diminishing by the day and the impact of social media raises the stakes disproportionately.

If you can't verify something exists, maybe you shouldn't sell it. Just a thought.

In many instances, this is just a case of broken telephone - the person handling the support or billing request is relaying often highly technical information from another source, and trying to translate it into English for a potentially non-technical user. I understand that, and I appreciate it's always going to be a bit of a Catch-22: oversimplify, and annoy the techie, or spout jargon and alienate the everyman. Since the latter is the majority, the tendency is to favour that as the lesser of two evils.

Still, it's not hard to spot the obvious fabrications. The "make up something plausible and hope he goes away" gambits. We seem to have an almost pathological aversion to admitting simple mistakes, and that's just silly. Look instead to the communication models being adopted by emerging online organisations, which boil down to: "Step up fast, admit you screwed up, apologise (and mean it), and seize the opportunity to demonstrate improvement."

But, then, do improve. If part of your business process involves selling something that doesn't exist, not only is that going to annoy customers, it's going to show up as costly inefficiencies, reputational damage, charge-backs and possible scrutiny by payment providers, and general business malaise. If you're papering over cracks, you're also denying yourself the opportunity to fix them.

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