Broken Customer Journey – HM Revenue and Customs
This relates a real experience I had with the HM Revenue and Customs Online Tax and NI customer journey.
It started with great design, but ended in a disastrous customer journey.
I was very successfully persuaded with a very clever piece of offline design to sign up! But when I tried, the rest of the journey was uninspiring and unpersuasive in the extreme, so I decided to stick with the cheque-stamp-and-post I currently use.
The business results for HM Revenue are clear – they made a big investment in a piece of very good offline design and associated print costs, but did not follow through and design the whole journey.
This is a common mistake made by many business that are in ‘offline’ and ‘online’ silos.
The customer journey spans online and offline they need to be designed together. Leaving parts of customer journey to chance will result almost always in a fail.
Funnily enough, I’ve seen this with HMRC before – remember the Child Tax Credits debacle. It appears that they are repeating the same mistakes. This is something I know we’ve discussed before and Roy Stringer used to be really concerned about the inability to think differently in an online presentation. The content may be the same (or similar), but the interaction with that content can be entirely different.
Oh, as a tangent, but it’s still HM Government – if you apply for your car tax online – don’t fill in the feedback comments (especially asking what fields are mandatory on the last page of the process and also why they default to OPT-IN for marketing contact, naughty boys,). I did so and was disconnected with a timeout message proclaiming that my application, which I had previously completed and received confirmation of, had failed and I would have to apply again. That now requires a phone call to check what’s happened. It’s not a freephone number either.