It’s the little things

Had an interesting experience today that seems instructive.

I’ve been considering doing some training, to work towards getting the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. I considered several sites, and couldn’t make up my mind, so I left it alone for a while.

Today, I received an email from one of the providers (not going to name names). Nothing new, they send me marketing stuff at least daily. Except that this had a big fat discount coupon code in it! So, I went on to the site, because I couldn’t remember what the regular price was.

My goodness, did I ever have to jump through hoops, including logging in, just to see their regular price! They have one of those Live Chat things on the site, so at one point I had asked the person (I assume it’s not a bot), about the cost. No answer. Just questions to things I’d already told them. Eventually, I found the answer I was looking for, and the discounted cost IS pretty competitive with the other options.

However, the poor overall experience has soured me on them altogether. I received a survey about my chat experience, and was sure to give them feedback on both the poor service on the chat, as well as the difficulty in finding their pricing.

After that, I decided to take another look at acloud.guru, which happens to have a course by someone I know and trust (Mark Nunnikoven). Their pricing is up-front and easy to find, and they make it very easy to see a fair bit about what they offer in every course.

I’m sure the company I won’t be going with won’t lose any sleep over my lack of registration, nor will acloud.guru have a big party when I sign up with them instead. However, I suspect that I’m not the only one who would find this experience frustrating. In a crowded market, it seems unwise to make potential customers work any harder than absolutely necessary to find the information they need to make a decision in your favour.