Balancing Speed-to-Market With Robustness Considerations

For many years now, I’m a highly satisfied user of LIC’s website for making online premium payments for my insurance policies. For those of you who don’t know, LIC or Life Insurance Corporation of India is a public sector corporation and India’s largest life insurance provider. This website works like a standard online bill payment site, so I’ll skip some of the basic steps. Suffice to mention that, when you select the bank from where you’d like to make your payment, LIC’s website hands over control to a third-party bill payment aggregator called BillDesk (similar to eBillMe in the US and iDEAL in the Netherlands) which passes the policy and premium information to your chosen bank’s Internet Banking website. After you authorize the payment by authenticating yourself to your bank’s Internet Banking website like you’d do normally, BillDesk takes you back to LIC’s website. Assuming that your payment was successful, LIC’s website automatically displays the receipt and lets you download it as a PDF and take a printout.

In over 30 times that I must have used LIC’s website in the last three years or so, there hasn’t been a single case of failed payment (knock on wood!).  

I cannot ascribe this track record to any private sector bill payment websites I’ve used during this period. My experience with them ranges from barely-passable to disastrous.

Take the case of a leading private sector broadband provider. Their online bill payment website used to be so unstable that I gave up trying to use it and went back to making payments by checks.

With another leading private sector telecom company, my experience was worse. For the first few months, everything was working smoothly with their online bill payment website. Then, suddenly, the telco canceled my service one day, claiming that they hadn’t received my payment for that month. When I pointed out to them that I’d received a ‘payment successful’ message from the payment gateway when I’d made the payment a couple of weeks before, they didn’t budge. I even offered to fax them a copy of my credit card statement displaying a debit entry for the said amount. Even then they refused to relent. Instead, they told me to pay the bill again if I wanted my service restored, then go to the payment gateway or my credit card issuing bank to claim a refund. I was so put off by this experience that, let alone online bill payment, I terminated my entire relationship with this telco.

Over two years ago, I’d written a blog post about shopping cart abandonment in a famous book e-tailer’s website. Since I faced this problem as recently as one month ago, I assume that they haven’t fixed this problem yet.

Contrast that with Indian Railways’ IRCTC ticket reservation website. Rated as the largest e-commerce website in Asia by transaction volumes, enough has been written commending IRCTC for webifying what is otherwise a painful process of standing in long queues for hours in dingy railway stations, and for its ingenuity in handling close to ten ticketing classes, over 80 quotas and a host of other complexites in Indian Railways’ ticketing process. But, since the subject matter of this blog post is robustness, I’ll steer clear from all that. 

Instead, let me only say one thing: there has never been a case of “abandoned shopping cart” in the last 5-6 years that my family and I have used the IRCTC website to book close to 100 tickets. Only once, when our Internet connection broke midway through the payment authorization process, we had to repeat the process. Since there was the possibility of payment happening twice, we were planning to contact IRCTC to inquire about this.  Beauty was, before we contacted IRCTC, they emailed us saying they suspected a duplicate payment and were investigating it. They went on to assure us that, if indeed there was a duplicate payment, they’d credit it back my credit card account very soon. As it turned out, there was a duplicate payment. Without me having to do any follow-up, we got the refund within a very reasonable period.

Not just superior customer service processes, this incident illustrates the robustness of IRCTC’s payment integration technology.

A couple of days ago, I happened to use the UK government’s HMRC website to file my tax returns for the past two years I’d been working and living in the UK. Usability wise, this website was fantastic: it made what is inherently a long and tedious process as painless as possible. But, since robustness is our theme, let me not digress. As readers may recall, due to the breakage in undersea cable near Egypt a couple of weeks ago, there has been a lot of disruption in Internet service of late. Maybe because of this, my connection to the HMRC website kept breaking many times before I could complete filing the return. Despite this, the website never lost any data that I’d previously entered. I didn’t have to retype anything.

Yet another example of a robust government web application.

These experiences make me wonder if robustness is given adequate consideration in the race for speed-to-market that characterizes many web transformation initiatives, especially the ones in the private sector. After all, what’s the point in launching an online bill payment website a few days or weeks (or even months) earlier, if customers find its behavior unstable, and either go back to writing checks or, worse still, break off their relationships with the service provider altogether?

Perhaps the leading Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe does have a point when it says in its ads, “if a certain watch movement takes 48 days to make, we will take 48 days to make it”.