Be Easy To Do Business With

As an avid Macintosh user who spends a lot of each day working at a computer, I’m always on the lookout for affordable software that can help me streamline my work process. Tonight I found a video utility that was useful, and decided to invest the $9.95 they wanted to purchase it. I used Paypal for payment, as I usually do for these types of purchases, and was astonished to receive this by email after I had already paid for the software and was awaiting the license:

“Your order is currently under evaluation by our antifraud specialists. We perform this verification to prevent unauthorized use of your PayPal account and personal details. In order to validate your payment and complete your order, please provide us with the following documents during the next two business days:

Please make sure that the documentation you provide is valid and legible. The name and address on your documentation must correspond with the information registered in your order. Your documentation should not be older than 6 months. Send only documents received by mail from the Utility companies. Send all the information and documents required as soon as possible to complete the review process.”

This company actually expects its customers to send of copies of the same kinds of documents that one can use to apply for a credit card or loan, open a bank account, etc in order to “validate” a $9.95 payment through Paypal, a service that already has built-in buyer and seller protection provisions?

Hmm… what if I don’t get my utility bill in the mail because I have online billing? And my driver’s license or passport cannot be older than 6 months? In California, our driver licenses are issued for 5 year terms, and passports are issued for much longer periods – so much for that.

My first reaction was that this might be a sophisticated phishing scam to get people to give up identity documents, but amazingly, it’s not a scam – I checked it out and the payment processor is legit. But it serves as a great example of how policies that come across as unreasonable paranoid or inappropriate in the context of what’s being sold can alienate customers and damage a company’s reputation quickly.

Let’s see what lessons can be learned here:

* If you’re worried about theft of your intellectual property, don’t treat your customers like criminals. Some companies that are concerned about e-commerce theft including Amazon and others have a simple solution: for those transactions they’re concerned about, call the seller on the phone and verify his or her information.

* When you’re designing security or anti-theft policy, make the policy proportionate to the risk. By demanding customers jump through ridiculously elaborate “hoops” that are way out of line for the type of purchase you’re trying to get them to conduct, you will probably just drive them away.

* When you partner with another company, make sure you know all the details about how that company is treating your customers. In this case, it was the payment processor, not the software vendor that was making the outrageous claims. But it’s the reputation of the software vendor that will be damaged by this kind of paranoid, unrealistic demands being placed on customers. I’m not a customer of the payment processor, I’m a customer of the software vendor, yet the payment processor is sabotaging the vendor’s customer relationship badly.

* Take reasonable precautions to guard against theft, but don’t come across as paranoid or unreasonable to the people you want to do business with. Can you imagine if a dry cleaner asked its customers to sign a 3-page binding agreement with all kinds of tough-sounding legal language and demands simply to drop off a few shirts for cleaning? Or a mall parking garage forcing everybody who came in to park their car to sign a contract in the office simply to park their car in the garage for an hour while shopping? In both of these situations there are basic legal protections already in place for both the customer and the provider of services that don’t require demanding the customer to undertake unreasonable actions simply for the “privilege” of purchasing a good or service.

A useful thing to do from time to time is to take a look at your entire sales cycle and focus on how your company appears to prospective and current customers at every stage of the cycle, from initial contact through product or service delivery. Study each and every possible interaction a customer can have with you or any third parties that handle any aspect(s) of the cycle for you, and try to identify and resolve situations that could result in customers being treated unreasonably.