Jim SinurI must have a sign on me that says “kick me”, because I ran into another set of bad processes in the real world. See past broken process posts:
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/07/13/another-broken-process-will-it-never-end/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/05/06/everybody-is-the-victim-of-a-poor-process/
This one really got me down because it happened at one of my more favorable times. I like “New”. Examples include new grandchildren, new friends, new business associates, new adventures and new epicurean experiences. I drove my old car down to Houston from Phoenix to trade it in on a new car (see the picture below of my Cadillac CTS-V) because I saved a ton of money by buying through the Internet. The down side of it was I had to drive 20 hours both ways in a weekend to reap the savings. The trip was an adventure, but I ran into another broken process; buying gas on credit cards.
I had no problems with purchasing gas on my favorite credit card at my favorite brand until late in the evening of the first night (I pay my card at the end of each month I like the awards it gives me). My credit card boinked (technical term for didn’t work) at a couple of my brand gas stations. I was too tired to fight it and I had plenty of cash at the beginning of the trip, so no problem. On the way back, I was running out of cash, so I was forced to the card for petrol purchases. I started noticing a pattern to the rejects; it was my favorite chain, so I switched brands. That settled it for a while and then it happened at two new chains. I asked the attendant why and he said “your credit card company was rejecting the requests”. I could hardly believe my ears. I pay on time and behave myself financially, that is. I was confused and put out. I was driving from one station to the other at each exit until my card worked.
This made me suspicious that each station was acting independently and/or the brands had some software that was looking at my buying patterns because my favorite brand was particularly difficult. Even when I stopped on my way back at the same exact station where the card worked before, I had problems (price, clean bathrooms and goodie selection within usual brand at certain mileposts influenced my decision to stop). Not only was I treated like a criminal, I was wasting time chasing gas when I needed it most. To make matters worse, I called my credit card company and they told me that all of my requests were authorized positively, so either the brands were rejecting me and/or the station owners were biased against credit against the brand guidelines. The other possibility is that the process denies on incomplete requests (poor design). The bottom line is I was abused by a broken process and certain brands will not get revenue from me in the future, Certainly a “lose/lose situation” and a process is to blame.
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Tags: BPM, Business Rules
10 responses so far ↓
1 Mike September 21, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Sounds like an anti-fraud process to me. Last time my friend’s credit card got skimmed, the skimmer bought moderate amounts of fuel at many, many outlets of the same brand of service station in one day. Clearly they knew that brand’s processes and limits. So this sounds like a defence to this. (Oh, and the bank caught this before my friend and put all the money back. No harm done – to my friend, that is.)
The underlying broken process is the black-and-white ‘accepted/rejected’ thing. There should be a ‘second step authorisation required’ process on suspicious transactions where you have to, for instance, talk to a call center and provide additional id through security questions.
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3 Jim Sinur September 22, 2009 at 11:06 am
Mike,
You couldn’t be more right. If there was a global process to verify like the credit card companies can, the process would have been just a minor inconvenience for frauds sake. Completely understandable and acceptable. What I experienced was not acceptable.
Jim
4 Nik September 22, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Hello Jim,
not exactly knowing how purchasing gas with a credit card works in the USA, still I would assume that the process is pretty much the same at each gas station. Especially considering that all requests were approved by your credit card company.
So if the process is the same, are we not talking about company rules or regulations, rather than a process?
Of course somewhere in this process a decision was made to deny the purchase, but this decision is based on a rule created by a specific company. I can’t see that this makes it a bad or broken process.
The company decided not to accept your credit card. Commenting Mike, this must have been an anti-fraud rule. Therefore the process did exactly what was expected.
Writing this comment and thinking about it, I can agree with you if you say that this \anti-fraud\ rule should be executed by a different role, e.g. the credit company rather than the petrol company. But that goes very much into detail and most likely the credit company is not willing to pay for this process step. All speculation, though.
Back to my point, aren’t we are not talking about a rule/regulation or role problem than a process problem?
Nik
5 Jim Sinur September 23, 2009 at 10:29 am
It is a combination of rules and a set of interacting processes. The credit card company has it’s process (rulles ladden; no doubt), each brand has their processs (with rules) and I have mine. I think Mike’s point is that the process needs to be extended to include vaild non-fraud excpetions because they are revenue laddened. If it happens to me, it must happen to others. We can debate if it processes are just an aggregation of rules or not, but I’m not sure that is worht it. There are rule vnedors who would agree and ther are process vendors who would not agree.
6 Nik September 25, 2009 at 9:52 am
This specific example should be seen as one process, which is purchasing gas. The process owner is the petro company and the participants (roles) are customer, petro company (represented by gas station), and (for credit card purchases) the credit card company.
Because the petro company implemented certain rules, the process was cancelled.
In my eyes, the process worked 100% fine. The outcome might disappoint the customer, but it seems that the petro company is willing to take that risk.
I disagree that it is not worth talking about rules. Rules are immanent in every process. But I am looking forward to discuss that in your new thread.
7 Jim Sinur September 25, 2009 at 11:55 am
This is why I will not buy gas from that petro company going forward. If this multiplies, they might feel some pain, like I did. Screw me; screw them
8 Rob Lewis October 3, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Poor processes equals poor service.
A satisfied customer tells 3 people. A disgruntled one tells 20.
They won’t feel pain if you don’t influence others by naming brands of companies that give poor service.
Maybe they’re a Gartner customer though ???
9 Jim Sinur October 4, 2009 at 8:45 am
Unfortunately, Gartner would not like me to bring on a lawsuit by naming the company. Many customers will figure it out themselves. I will only tell my close associates
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