I spent the third week of June helping a family member move roughly 2,300 miles from Montana to southeastern Massachusetts. It was a test of endurance for which I am increasingly unsuited—five days of seeing if two people and one senior tuxedo cat could coexist in a jam-packed Volkswagen Beetle for anywhere from 400 to 600 miles.
It was also a smorgasbord of experiences for a payment geek, for good (tap-to-pay technology is widely available, from the biggest retailers in the most cosmopolitan cities to the smallest merchants in deepest Wisconsin, and I’m here and there for all of it) and for ill (blown tires aren’t fun anywhere, not even in Pennsylvania).
Finally, it was a reminder that e-commerce, for all its utility and all its relief from the costs of call centers, can go frustratingly wrong if customers’ basic needs are not met. Merchants have responsibilities that don’t stop when their customers are funneled to online or mobile channels. In fact, clarity, transparency, and the thoughtful placement of information become even more vital when a merchant clearly would prefer to sell to customers digitally.
Let’s dig in.
It Depends on the Meaning of ‘Pet’
Before the move began, I plotted a route and a series of stops. I booked hotels online, through my preferred hotel chain (gold member, baby!), and I researched my options to ensure that Spatz the Tuxedo Cat would be welcome.
I’ll stop here to point out that the term “pet-friendly,” in the hotel game, really means only “dog-friendly.” Cat owners need to drill down and discover the property’s attitude toward felines. Through this particular chain’s site, that means visiting the page for the individual property and looking for the language that is inclusive or exclusive: “We welcome pets” (Spatzy loves those properties) or “we welcome dogs only.” (Snake owners and tarantula owners, I suppose, had best place a phone call or just sneak the pet in. I’ll look the other way.)
At a certain hotel in Bismarck, N.D., I found the language I was seeking: “We welcome pets.” Those same magic words proved amenable to hosting Spatzy in St. Cloud, Minn., and Chicago and New Castle, Pa., and North Dartmouth, Mass. But just one day and 400 miles into our drive, we discovered that “we welcome pets” did not, in fact, mean “we welcome Spatz.” We also discovered that every room in Bismarck was booked—who knew?—and that we wouldn’t find a cat-friendly place until Fargo, nearly 200 miles east.
That made for a long night and a short sleep. It also made for an interesting phone conversation with the hotel chain’s customer service center the next morning, as I meticulously formed a cogent argument out of what I’ve detailed above: If you’re going to push customers to digital booking—where, in fairness, I’d prefer to interact anyway—you need to give them the salient information to book confidently. Or you need to be prepared to suffer reputational harm when you tell a customer who’s shown up in good faith that, welp, we didn’t mean what our website says and your cat isn’t welcome here.
I’ll make the same point to the on-premises hotel manager as soon as my call is returned. It’s been more than a week, so I’m not holding my breath.
Clarity Above All
To telescope this out so it’s less about me and Spatzy and our experience and more about the larger world of merchant payments and e-commerce, I’ll say this: As consumers, we see these kinds of customer service glitches all the time, and they’re frustrating because they’re unforced errors.
For example, merchants with opaque or confusing return policies court chargebacks and the possibility of outcomes that can prove fatal to the enterprise (a topic Javelin Strategy & Research recently covered in A New Era of Chargeback Management). My situation in Bismarck wasn’t a chargeback—though it would have been had the hotel added to the indignity by attempting to charge me for the night. It was, however, a sour interaction precisely because the merchant didn’t make its policies clear. Clarity is simple, or should be, and it can stave off bad outcomes and deepen merchant-customer relationships.
Being a merchant is tough, with a dizzying array of responsibilities, costs, and frustrations, and I won’t pretend that the customer is always right, despite the old chestnut to the contrary. Customers can be petty and demanding and obtuse and vituperative. They’re also essential to the whole being-in-business thing, which is why merchants are well advised to offer convenient and popular payment options, continually upgrade offerings, and communicate clearly.
I met my responsibility as a consumer. (To those who say I should have called each property beforehand—hi, Mom!—I have two responses: 1. You’re probably right. 2. A clear policy would have ensured I didn’t have to. That’s unwanted friction for me.) The hotel, on the other hand, failed to clear the bar.
In the end, Spatzy and her human did make it safely home to Massachusetts. For that, at least, I can be thankful.
