Last week I talked about creating delightful experiences for customers. But I have to be fair and admit that there’s a flip side as well.

This came to mind just yesterday when I got a new tool for my woodshop. The tool is great, although the assembly instructions weren’t as uniform in their detail as I would have liked.

Then I came to the registration card.

The “card” was eight pages long. With all kinds of questions about how I might use the product, my income level, my occupation, and so on. So I debated on whether to just answer some of the questions, or even bother with all that.

But they had a URL at the bottom of the card, so I decided to give that a shot.

Error 404: Page not found

OK, this is starting to look pretty clueless to me. But I did manage to find a product registration page on the website.

Question 1: Which product did you purchase?

Product not found.

Let’s think about this for a moment. What’s the purpose of product registration? To make a link with the customer so they might buy more from us in the future. Maybe to learn something about our customers so we can build better products.

But probably not to have them get frustrated with our products, the interactions, and our company.

How are all YOUR customer touchpoints working these days? Any of them which are broken or annoying? Are they current with how people want to interact these days?