Dear Veolia.

Dear Veolia,

This morning I received your joint suspension notice with the Office of Regional Refuse and Recycling Program. Non-payment of the outstanding balance was indeed an oversight, as I clearly missed that I needed to re-enroll for automatic bill pay. However, I would like to share with you the frustration of trying to pay this bill upon receipt of your notice.

As I am in Boston on business all next week, I immediately called the number your provided for those who have not re-enrolled in Veolia’s automatic bill pay to update my account information, as per your instructions. As it is a Saturday, no one was available to talk to, nor was there a way to leave a message.

Next, I sat down and accessed the Veolia website your letter provides so that I could re-enroll and pay my bill that way. In the account information section of the Enrollment form, it asks for an account number, a site number, and an invoice number. I won’t get into the semantics of an invoice number being unnecesary when you are trying to set up an account. This is the image the page helpfully provides:

You were also kind enough to enclose a notice of past due payment. This is my account information as provided by you:

Note that the customer and account number correspond neither in name nor format. As for the invoice number, the only thing I have is a date, which I entered but it won’t accept. Sadly, as I’ve stopped receiving paper invoicing (per one of your earlier requests) I do not have a previous invoice of my own to see if the information is there.

So I have now exhausted all avenues of paying this bill at this moment in time. I will either have to call your office while I’m at work (and out. of. town) or drive to your office and hope I can slide payment under the door. Which, of course, I will then have to confirm by calling your office–while I’m at work (and out. of. town). So, either way, your website is completely useless to me and I must resort to calling your office staff. I can only hope they are more useful than your website.

I cannot be the only Veolia customer who has missed re-enrolling in automatic payment of my bills after you redesigned your website and forced this debacle. Nor can I be the only customer who has been stymied by the mismatch of information required and information on hand to complete a basic online account set up.

From where I stand, you might still need to work on the management component to “waste management”, but I believe you have the concept of waste down perfectly. I’ll be sending you an invoice for my wasted time and effort under separate cover, as well as the names of several designers who can enlighten you as to the concepts of usability and the user experience.

Regards.