Pep Boys and Making People Wait…

Posted by Fitzy

October 28, 2007

Hi all…

You may think from the title that this is a little off-topic, but it really isn’t. I recently had to go to Pep Boys to have them replace the battery in my wife’s car. The cold finally killed the old one and we were about to head out on a trip, so we needed it fixed immediately.

According to Google, the closest place to have that done (after AAA came and gave me a jump start) was Pep Boys. So, I trundled over to Pep Boys to have them take care of it. I was even happy enough to see that there was just one other gentleman in line in front of me, so I assumed it would only be a couple of minutes before we could get the process started…

Not so easy, it turns out. The Pep Boys I went to was one trying out some new software (written by an IBM development group in China) up front to run their store. Everything from entering customers, checking old records, getting parts ordered, and so on. Well, it turns out that the software was just bad enough to make them learn ways to get around quirks it had instead of actually doing their job and helping customers.

What was even more amusing to me was that while I was sitting there waiting to be helped, the guy at the counter got a call from one of the developers asking how they liked the software. The man at the counter was very polite and told him that he’d have to call back when he didn’t have a line of customers forming because his software wasn’t allowing him to help people quickly enough.

I’m a software engineer, so I found all this very entertaining. Nice to not be the guy being yelled at (occasionally) by folks because your software doesn’t work.

But I digress… This illustrates an important problem that everyone providing a service — bloggers, website developers, software engineers, writers, advertising widget makers, and so on — needs to be aware of. Never make your customer wait, or you’ll lose the customer. I had no way of getting anywhere, or I would have left Pep Boys and taken my car elsewhere — but I couldn’t because my car wouldn’t start.

It came up that my site was slow to load in IE7 this past week. I’m not an IE user any more. I have been pretty faithful to Firefox for a while now. But I will have to go through and see which widgets work fine on Firefox but not on IE7 and see what’s going on.

Performance is a huge factor in software development also. People don’t want to have to deal with your stuff — they want to use your stuff to get their stuff done. If they can’t use your stuff — they’ll find someone else’s stuff to use, and so on…

So it’s just one more way of making sure that you don’t lose your customers!

Until next time…

–Fitz

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