One of the common online services that I find very frustrating is the functionality of many utility providers to set up recurring payments. I would understand it if the functionality was complex, difficult to get right, but recurring payments are pretty straightforward. It’s pretty clear what the right thing to do here is.

When I set up a recurring payment, I want to pay the bill — the bill that until now I used to pay manually (unless this is the first time I’m paying the bill) — automatically. So that I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t want to start paying two months from now, and I don’t want to pay the next month’s bill twice. I just want it to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

I never trust the service when I’m doing setting up recurring payments. Many providers don’t make it clear which payments I set up, starting when, and how they may interact with manual payments. The user interface is always complicated, which doesn’t make sense to me because the expected user experience is very simple. And I don’t buy that setting up a recurring payment should take two cycles (seems like an artifact of how things used to be done — when changes made by mail might take a week to reach the processing center, which could cause a race condition; but even then, again, it’s clear that I simply want to ensure I continue paying the bill and never have to pay twice for the same bill).

Thank you to my friend S.C. for inspiration for this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2011 at 14:31 and is filed under The Daily Badness, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.