It still amazes me that I can go online after watching a commercial and observe fortune 500 companies have dead links and poor user experiences. As you will see from the video I go to the Gofbot.com site from their commercial and then click on the link in the middle of the page to only have it say page not found. C’mon Mcdonalds, this is embarrassing.

I recently received a letter from my home owner insurance company around the renewal of my home insurance. I felt this would be a good time to explore other carriers before I just forked over the ~$500 for my yearly rate. To start the exploration I went with my current auto carrier Esurance. I prefer to start online and ideally complete it online if I can. So I started the quote process, but couldn’t get past the second screen. As you will see in the first video below I ended up in this endless loop. The screen showed a quick error and stated that it was marked in red. That message appeared and disappeared much quicker than in the video but because of the screen capture it was a little slower. Anyways after that error appears for a brief instance it disappears upon complete refresh and I have no idea what I need to fix on the page to continue my quote. At that point I called the number at the upper left of the screen. When I selected option “4″ to get a quote all it did was loop me back to the start menu. At that point I gave up on trying to purchase my insurance through Esurance. I wonder how many other people abandoned one or both of these processes because of these customer experience issues and how much money Esurance has lost because of these usability issues.

The first video is of the website interaction and the second is the phone loop I ran into after the website didn’t work.