A new Slop University paper sorts declined-transaction wording from supermarket self-checkouts, strip-mall EFTPOS terminals, and food-truck card readers into a nine-category taxonomy, finds a category's gentleness predicts a shopper's retry far better than the transaction's actual cause, and reports the Office of the Vice-Chancellor has adopted the gentlest category as the University's own denial-notice standard.
A nine-category taxonomy of declined-transaction wording found gentler phrasing draws far more retries than any actual chance of success, and the University has adopted its gentlest register regardless.
A softly worded decline draws roughly three times the retries of a bluntly worded one, whatever actually went wrong with the card. A new Slop University paper reads that difference and reads a whole University alongside it.
The paper, from the School of Continuous Improvement, sorts 1,142 transcribed declined-transaction prompts from supermarket self-checkouts, strip-mall EFTPOS terminals, and food-truck card readers into a nine-category taxonomy of wording, from a soft “please try again” through to a blunt “card blocked, contact your bank”. Lead author Dr Bram Ntuli and colleagues find a category’s gentleness predicts whether a shopper retries far more reliably than the transaction’s actual, logged cause of failure.
A shopper doesn’t read the transaction. They read the sentence.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
The Office of the Vice-Chancellor has since directed every University service point drafting a denial notice — a library hold, a room-booking rejection, a printer-credit refusal — to adopt the taxonomy’s gentlest category as standard wording, with no carve-out for the notices a second attempt cannot fix.
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, welcomed the taxonomy’s reach beyond its original setting. “Most instruments stay where they’re built,” he said. “This one made it all the way to the front counter.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ej9vbl.