I’ve Got Process Governance on My Mind

I went to update my metro­card yes­ter­day, and after charg­ing my card $50, my receipt said “could not write to media call sup­port” (or some­thing close to that).

I went to the booth and the per­son there was won­der­ful. She was pleasant, knowledgeable, and thor­oughly unable to help me.

I had to call to get my refund.

Well, not really.

I had to call and the auto­mated sys­tem told me I had to write to get my refund.

I spoke to a per­son, then a manager.

You see, I expected it would be easy for them to sim­ply credit the trans­ac­tion. Just like if I were in a cafe and they billed me wrong. They would undo the wrong trans­ac­tion and redo it cor­rectly right on the spot.

Appar­ently, the MTA (NYC Sub­way sys­tem) can’t do that.

The process is to send in the info, and within 3–4 weeks, if I’m lucky, I’ll get the proper refund. Of course, there’s no way to track the sta­tus of that refund process, so I have no idea if they got what I sent them, or if what I sent them was what they need.

I won­dered why. Why couldn’t the clerk in the booth sim­ply exchange my receipt and failed metro­card for one of the proper value? Bet­ter yet, if the machine could tell me what the prob­lem was, why couldn’t it just back the trans­ac­tion out? Or, sub­mit it auto­mat­i­cally to be repaired, and give me a track­ing code? The receipt (and machine) had all the infor­ma­tion needed — the orig­i­nal bal­ance, the charge amount, the prob­lem, the metro­card num­ber, the ID of the auto­mated machine I used, and the last four of my credit card.

When I called, I said, if I called the bank, they’d sim­ply undo the trans­ac­tion. The response? “We’re not a bank.” Well, if I was at a cafe and they charged me wrong, it would sim­ply be undone/redone. “We’re not a cafe.”. Really? I didn’t realize.

I think what it came down to was a lack of trust of the employ­ees. In order to pre­vent abuse/fraud, there was a tightly con­trolled sys­tem to man­age refunds. The sys­tem is prob­a­bly centralized.

What I don’t under­stand, with all the mod­ern tech­nol­ogy and dis­trib­uted gov­er­nance out there, why they can’t do a bet­ter job at detect­ing and pre­vent­ing fraud/abuse, while at the same time improv­ing the cus­tomer experience?

You might think, it’s the MTA, they have no rea­son to care about the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. I’d dis­agree. I think there is com­plete aware­ness that a bet­ter expe­ri­ence leads to more under­stand­ing cus­tomers. In the last decade I’ve per­son­ally noticed improve­ments at the Post Office and the Depart­ment of Motor Vehi­cles related appar­ently to the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. I remem­ber read­ing that a side effect of focus­ing on the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at the DMV was bet­ter employee sat­is­fac­tion. But, I digress.

I think the MTA could save a lot of money pro­cess­ing these refunds, while improv­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence quite “eas­ily”. Why? Well, this process is really easy. Refund a failed trans­ac­tion. It’s easy to fig­ure out where the com­plex parts of the pro­ces are, and design around them. It’s all been done before by oth­ers. It would save money, give peo­ple more con­fi­dence, and it seems that stuff like this hap­pens a lot, so would affect a lot of people.

By the way, notice how I used “easy” and “com­plex” in the same descrip­tion there. Think about this… Easy is to hard as com­plex is to sim­ple.