Data entry and usability

For the past few days I’ve been doing temp work as a customer relations assistant dealing with letters from annoyed train company customers (Some of them are whiny but others I can well understand why they are pissed off).

The software I used is a CRM system (Remedy Action Request System 4.0) and basically my past 3 days has been spent bashing my head against the desk because of the usability issues that made my work more difficult than it needed to be.

The group I was in only started on Tuesday and so we were given the easy task (for ‘easy’ read boring and repetative and that any trained monkey could do). We were dealing with all complaints from a specific incident where the signals completely screwed up and lots of trains were cancelled and the ones that weren’t went to their destinations slower than a stoned sloth on sedatives.

This was basically what I had to do:

1. In the CRM open the topmost scanned document in the list and check that it is for a specific date
2. Use Search Customer form to check database for record matching customer. If found use this customer, else make a new one in the New Customer form (using an external address lookup program to autocomplete the address fields if necessary).
3. Add a note for the customer file about sending compensation and standard letter.
4. Link the case to the specific signal failure incident (search in the incident screen)
5. Go to the Create Letter page and send a standard letter. Click the create button to open up a Microsoft Word document with the customer details pre-filled and the standard header and footer. Copy and paste the standard appolagetic reply for the incident from another open Word document, filling out some places with details from the scanned document. Save and print document.
6. Open the Compensation page and add vouchers for click print vouchers.
7. Close the case

Usability problems encountered so far with the system (not limited to the CRM software)

• Scanned document cannot be viewed at the same time as the data entry screen requiring constant Alt+tabbing between the two
• Scanned document viewer application doesn’t allow you to see it full screen, even if you maximize the application the scrollable picture area remains only about 400x400px in size
• There is no button in the image viewer app to return to normal zoom, you have to either zoom out many times after you’ve zoomed in or go forward one page in the document and then one page backward to reset the zoom level.
• There is no button in the image viewer app to change the rotation of the document
• the search in the incident page doesn’t respond to enter keypress, instead requires button click.
• The postcode field on the search form (the easiest field to find a customer on) is halfway down and not selected when you bring it up
• The Search form doesn’t respond to hitting enter either, you need to click the button
• The search form doesn’t let you create a new customer record from an existing record therefore if a new customer is found that lives in the same postcode as an existing one you still have to fill out all the details rather than just change a maximum of 4 fields (house no, title, first name, surname)
• The tabbing order on the Create Customer page wasn’t designed by a sane person.
• Search Customer and Create Customer are not on the same form, therefore it is more difficult to avoid duplicate records this was probably why there were so many in the database. The only way they are integrated is if you try to add a record with the surname and postcode the same as an existing record it will ask you are you sure. Then you have to exit that form and search for the customer to see if it’s actually a duplicate or whether it is people related to each other in the same house (which it sometimes was but by the time you’ve found that out you’ve already exited the form to go to the search page and have therfore lost the address you entered).
• When producing a standard letter things have to be manually altered for each one because the software is stupid. It would fill in the customer’s name and address at the top but wouldn’t fill in the initial of their first name (If this isn’t filled in manually then people complain that the letter is too ‘impersonal’). It also left blank lines in the address block if a field was not filled in which had to be deleted manually from each letter.
• The second page of each letter had to be manually adjusted to because some idiot had no idea of how to set up print margins in Microsoft Word. We were advised to hit enter until the top of the line was below the 3 marker on the side ruler.
• There were some changes in paragraph spacing that had to be made for each letter, I can only blame this on the incompetence of the person who set up the templates.
• The text we had to paste in from the other document always ended up in 10pt Century Gothic font for some unknown reason despite the two documents both being in 12pt Arial.
• The compensation page insists on getting you to click to select a specific voucher in the list when trying to ‘print voucher(s)’ even if there is only one voucher in the list.
• The voucher printing program which shows a preview of each voucher to be printed completely forgets which printer you’re using so every single time when you are not using the printer it defaulted to (which was every time for the task I was doing) you have to go into it’s configuration dialog and change the printer you want.

N.B. This list is nowhere near complete, I was only using a small amount of the systems full functionality. I’m sure there are more things that suck about it.

I really suspect that the people who setup this system or wrote this software have never done data-entry in their lives and never actually had to use it beyond checking that it didn’t break.

Note to people designing this type of software, it is not meant to be clickable and friendly for newbies. It is meant to be used in a high-volume kind of way that means optimise for speed. Newbies may be puzzled at the lack of a search button to click but after they’ve been using it a few hours they will thank you for being able to hit the enter key rather than having to take their hands away from the keyboard in order to use the mouse.

Now my assignment with this company has finished because I was ‘surplus to requirements’ due to the backlog having been cleared or so the agency told me, so I go in to get my timesheet signed and I find that the rest of my group (i.e. people also hired to clear their backlog) are still there and being trained on new stuff. It might have been because my stats showed that I got through the least cases but that was probably because when I found a case that wasn’t part of the backlog I filled in the customer details anyway to save one of the more experienced people wasting their time on such a trivial task.

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