Stupid, Lazy or Mean?

Why must the BBC website tease us so?

2011-12-04T00:53:00.000-08:00

"Derbyshire town faces severe traffic delays" is the sort of headline that newspapers use to make sure that you buy their paper - if it told you which town in the headline (which would be shorter - normally a virtue in headlines) then only those in the affected town would buy.

We accept this because there seems no other way to fund a local press, and many people feel this is important enough that we allow ourselves to be repeatedly gulled in this way.

But why does the BBC need to copy this? We pay them directly for their news services. So surely they should deliver time-efficient news headlines. They don't need to trick us into clicking on deliberately-vague headlines with a 95% chance that we will have wasted our time: they can let us into the secret at the outset.

So why can't the BBC - on their Derbyshire News site (for example) - headline the item "Alfreton faces severe traffic delays" or "Matlock faces severe traffic delays". That way, I can skip over it if I have no plans to visit the affected town, or read it if I do.

There are two explanations I can see. One is laziness: while a local town name is clearly more appropriate for a story on a Local site (eg BBC Derbyshire), if the story were used nationally, a broader geographical description is appropriate. Forgiveable (but disappointingly clumsy) if the story is one which might garner national attention, but not for stories which are clearly never going to qualify for inclusion in a national feed.

The sadder possibility is that in our target-driven databased managerial culture, nothing is considered real unless there is "evidence" - and unless I can be bullied into clicking on a link about a story, BBC underlings cannot "prove" to higher-ups and politicians that the stories are being valued by those who pay for them. At some point in future, we will look back sadly on this big-numbers-good era of management-by-pocket-calculator and wonder how we could be so clumsy.

Plusnet - only for those with a lot of time on their hands

2011-10-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

They may be cheap. They may be from Yorkshire. But helping a neighbour transfer across to them has been a complete misery.

Their systems just don't seem geared to helping ordinary people. If you sign up before you have your MAC code, you will want to tell PlusNet what the MAC code is. There were links that promised to help you do this, but they linked to pages that didn't do what they promised. And their online help is so poor, too. Once you have logged on, and proved who you are, why can't the instructions on logins and passwords show the actual values that you need to use, rather than the "insert the original password you chose when signing up"? It all feels very lazy.

Come changeover day, the logon to PlusNet didn't work. Calling PlusNet, (approaching 10 minutes to speak to anyone) the agent spotted that the account hadn't been enabled at their end, and fixed that - we should wait a few minutes and try again. After another 10 minutes or so, it was indeed fixed. But why did we have to ask them? - they had written to say that changover was fixed for this date, so they must have known what needed doing and when.

And then there was the email. Any other ISP will provide you with an email address, or at least make sure that you have chosen one before you complete your signup. Not PlusNet - it is perfectly possible to sign up and not realise that you need to take the extra step of choosing an email address. And when you do that - please wait 4 HOURS for it to be enabled. Their agent said "it may work sooner" - what he didn't say was "within that four hours, it may start to work outbound, but don't be fooled into thinking that everything is then OK, as inbound mail may still be bounced with DNS errors".

All in all, a miserable experience. Unless we have been uniquely clumsy or unfortunate, PlusNet must be hacking off countless customers, and costing themselves a fortune in handling Customer Support calls.

What are Wetherspoons playing at?

2011-09-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

I thought I understood the Wetherspoon business model: attractive pubs, with a strong food offering, keen pricing and ruthless efficiency. It looked like a winning strategy.

So, why have they become coy about telling customers how much their drinks cost? At their "Sheffield Waterworks Company" pub this week, it was a miserable experience to choose a bottle of wine to go with lunch.

The food menu is clear. But the separate drinks menu - whilst long on detail - has no prices on it. I asked for a drinks menu with prices: the manager told me that it was now Wetherspoons policy not to give prices on the drinks menu.

Drinks prices for beers and mixers are displayed - on a printed list on an easel as you enter. But if more than the occasional customer paused to make their decisions there, the place would grind to a halt. Sat down at your table, you are faced with heading back to the easel to look a the prices - or asking your companions what they want without knowing how much it will cost.

And if you want wine, there is no help at all - the easel tells you to see the drinks menu, and the drinks menu doesn't tell you. I ended up having to borrow a pen, then stand at the cash register asking the price of each bottle in turn, then writing them down on a drinks menu before returning to my companions to make our choice.

If Wetherspoons were seeking premium cost-no-issue customers, then perhaps this would be a good approach: I am sure there are plenty of up-market outlets which do very well on customers' embarrassment or profligacy to charge prices they would rather not display.

But Wetherspoons have built up a strong reputation as a good-value operation, and the prices I eventually teased out of them were very reasonable. Why on earth would a price-led operation want to hide its prices?

My guess is some aggressive new manager who thinks that this move will let them increase prices without customers noticing, or get customers trading up to higher-margin options that they wouldn't choose if they knew the price.

In the short term, that may work: we didn't walk out when faced with the new guess-the-price policy. But in the longer term, there is a real danger that there will be others like me, vowing not to return to an operation that they once respected, but which seems to have taken a big lurch towards greed and away from customer service.

Photobox - what is their concept of Customer Service?

2011-08-27T01:19:00.000-07:00

Photobox weren't the cheapest option for a couple of photo books, but I thought that by going to a brand leader, one might at least expect competent performance.

Two books received - one with scoring across half of the pages, which any competent Quality Control process should have picked up.

And both books have photos with white lines down the edge (which is horrible against the black background we chose) - in one case, we now realise it was visible on the preview (so our fault), but not in the other three cases where the preview looked absolutely fine.

An online complaint made on Wednesday received the promise of a response by end of Friday (not really very impressive for a business selling gifts which are likely to be time-sensitive) - but Photobox failed to honour even that deadline. With a bank holiday weekend it will be the next Tuesday before we can even call them as their Customer Service is an office-hours-only affair.

So, my tentative conclusions:

Photobox software does not provide a reliable means of checking the quality of the book you have designed
Photobox do not do either an automatic or a manual check of the design you have uploaded to check for obvious errors (or at least, not for the white lines down the edge of photos)
Photobox do not have a reliable Quality Control process to pick up manufacturing faults before despatch
Photobox are mean in the hours over which they offer Customer Service access, and very slow in responding to online complaints

Other than that, they seem fine!

Mypix - case study in deterring feedback

2011-08-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

I was trying to decide which supplier to use for a PhotoBook project, when Mypix sent me a promotion that seemed just right.

Everything looked fine, until I read in the description "You tell your own story using text and photos on the top quality satin pages inside (170 g/m²). All you've got to do is slide your photos in. "

Suddenly, I felt that I didn't understand their product. Satin pages at 170 g/m² fitted with my expectation of a product where I uploaded photos and perhaps text, and they printed them onto pages which they bound into a book. Everything else fitted with this, except the last sentence: All you've got to do is slide your photos in.

Was this a bad translation (MyPix is based in France) - where "slide your photos in" refers to the process of designing your pages onscreen? Or are they actually offering to send you a book with text printed on pages with transparent sleeves, and a pack of appropriately-sized photos that you then "slide" into the sleeves - not at all the same product (and hard to match with the "satin" description).

The obvious solution was to ask Mypix - if it was a product with a major disadvantage that they wanted to gloss over, then at least I would know, and if it was a bad translation then I could buy this otherwise-perfect offer and could even suggest that they do me an extra-special deal in thanks for the future sales I was saving them from losing.

But it looks as if I will never know - because MyPix only want feedback on their terms. I am free to write to them in France. I can phone them at a premium rate. Or I can send them an email about my existing order with them or difficulties uploading pictures. But helpful feedback that might help them losing sales? Not welcome. There is no method offered to send them an email unless it fits one of their very limited range of subjects on which they are happy to be contacted.

So Mypix aren't going to get my feedback and can merrily go on confusing (and perhaps unnecessarily turning away) potential customers, comfortable in ignorance. If they are privately owned, then I guess that arrogance is a luxury that their owners are free to indulge in at their own expense. But if they are a public company, then I would think their shareholders might be a bit upset to see their earnings potential depressed by such an approach.

Lost broadband service is becoming as serious as lost electicity supply

2011-07-12T03:20:00.000-07:00

If you report that your electricity has failed, your electricity supplier will respond pretty quickly - 24/7. They will look into the fault, and carry on their analysis until they have found the fault, then they will fix it, then they will check that the problem is cleared. It's not uncommon to find them digging up a pavement in the middle of the night to get the supply restored.

Now contrast this with loss of Broadband service for the many of us who have are outside cable-TV areas, on exchanges where only BT have any equipment. As I write this, several neighbours have been without Broadband for over a week. They have different kit on the end of their phone lines. They are on different cables from the exchange. Their phones work but their Broadband doesn't. BT's response has been to send engineers to homes, and in one case to send them a new router. You or I might conclude that this is a problem at the exchange and hope that BT were pretty adept at testing and fixing their own kit on their own premises. But still the problem isn't fixed.

As the internet has grown, so more and more activities and services have first had an internet option added, and then had the non-internet options removed. Without internet, you can't make or change a booking on some airlines. Your kids can't do their homework (which increasingly assumes internet access). You can't even check your BT bill (unless you have opted to pay them extra for a paper bill).

But as the internet has become more crucial, nothing has been done to adjust BT's service obligation to reflect this. This needs fixing urgently - but with a toothless Ofcom and an anti-intervention government, what hope do we have?

London 2012 tickets - why didn't they say how many tickets there would be at each price?

2011-06-05T22:29:00.000-07:00

London 2012's director responsible for tickets, Chris Townsend, is reported by BBC as having failed to address the issue of why people were not told in advance how many tickets were available in each price band for each session.

In the absence of any denial, there are two possible explanations.

Perhaps the ticketing sale operation people we inept. They certainly managed a balloting system which demonstrates a real contempt for customer choice (see my previous item on this). So perhaps they just didn't think to bother telling people how many tickets were available at each price.

But it makes much more sense to me that they didn't tell people because they didn't know.

Take the simple example of a theatre with 10 rows of seats and two prices: £10 and £15. We wouldn't get too upset if for a production expected to sell really well, they offered 4 rows at £10 and 6 rows at £15 while for a lesser production or a less popular night, there might be 7 rows at £10 and 3 rows at £15. But we would expect the theatre to commit up-front as to which price applied to which row.

A canny theatre manager might want to keep their options open and not sell tickets for rows F G and H to begin with. When they knew how demand was going, they could decide the price for each of those rows to maximise their revenue. But something about our expectations of "fair play" might have customers get upset about this.

But for the Olympics, managing ticket demand so that customers declared their intentions up-front would have allowed them to be like the clever theatre manager, but without the grief.

The imperative to maximise Olympics ticket revenue would suggest that they didn't want to decide which block of seats was at which price until they knew how many people were willing to buy at each price point. If you have 10,000 seats and there is demand for 3,000 at the top price, 5,000 at the middle price and 15,000 at the bottom price, then you simply offer 2,999 at top price, 4,999 at middle price and 2,002 tickets at the bottom price. That way you can report that you "had to" conduct a ballot for tickets at each price point - but you maximise your revenue. Perhaps political considerations limit quite how far you can push this, but it would make a big difference to your income.

So, if my guess is right, London 2012 simply didn't know how many tickets there were going to be at each price. It all depended on how many people were willing to pay the higher prices.

BT drop to new low in candour and honesty

2011-05-07T01:57:00.000-07:00

I've just wasted five minutes having been suckered by BT - and nearly cost myself a lot more, too.

BT tried to entice me to pay for a year's line rental in advance, and offered a juicy discount for doing so. I carefully scanned the list of features, looking to see whether this involved my routing calls via BT (rather than much-cheaper ICUK who I currently use).

Things you need to know about Line Rental Saver

Only available with paper-free billing (view your bill online and receive no paper bill)
You must set up Direct Debit to cover any call changes made throughout the year
You need to make at least two BT calls per month to avoid monthly charge of £1.50 being added to your bill
Line Rental Saver payment is non-refundable
At the end of the 12 months you'll revert to monthly line rental unless you tell us otherwise
If you currently get a discount for paper-free billing, this will stop
Some calling plans aren't available with Line Rental Saver. If this is the case we'll let you know and you can then choose to change your Calling Plan or remain on monthly line rental

Nothing there about shifting my calls - two calls a month via BT is something I can live with.

So I waded through the screens declining all the extras BT wanted me to buy, and there at the final screen was a minor detail that they had forgotten to mention at the outset:

By completing this order you are agreeing to switch your calls back to BT.

Oh, didn't they mention that at the outset? They didn't explicitly ask me whether I was OK about this. How careless of them only to slip it in at the last minute along with a lot of other verbiage.

When a company is gifted a monopoly, I reckon they need to try extra hard not to come across as taking advantage of that to bully their customers.

BT seem not to agree. This reinforces my dislike of the company and makes it a long time before I will invest the effort in exploring any temptations they may try on me.

Welcome to Nottingham?

2011-05-06T09:35:00.000-07:00

Is Nottingham serious about attracting visitors?

Visit the City Council's What's On listings to see the my nomination for Most Pathetic Information Website Of The Year award (and if there is no such award, there should be one).

Start looking through their list of an impressive 3556 events, and it won't be long before you are questioning your sanity. Surely 6th May is a Friday, but here is "Community Retail Market - Tuesdays Only". A slip perhaps? No - there it is again on Saturday, along with Javier Perianes - Sunday Morning Series .

What's happening? It seems that any event that happens more than once is listed on every single day between its first instance and its last - with the days of operation appended to the title to try and atone for the irrelevance. So the user is expected to wade through dozens of nonsense entries to try and find out what is on offer. Forget it, we'll try Sheffield instead.

Have Nottingham bought/signed up to a rubbish events system that can't cope with events happening on a number of occasions that aren't consecutive? If so, that's quite an achievement.

Or do they have a system that could show the information properly, but the staff don't know how to use it properly?

Either way, Nottingham are doing nothing for the notion that the public sector can be trusted to spend money competently. Shame on them.

Freeview can't be bothered to receive feedback

2011-04-26T01:24:00.000-07:00

Mustn't it be wonderful to run a company that feels no obligation to deal with messy customer feedback?

I wanted to tell Freeview that their website needed updating to show that Radio 7 is now Radio 4extra. Not mindblowingly important, but the sort of minor update that helps avoid confusing customers.

How do I tell Freeview about this?

There seems to be no way in which I can. Their Site Map gives no Contact Us information. An email to "webmaster@freeview.co.uk" (an address suggested on a discussion board) bounces back. Their Chief Executive, Ilse Howling, has a nice distinctive name, but a quick search failed to unearth an email address even for her.

So Freeview carry on ignorant of my little bit of feedback - or any more serious errors that anybody might want to tell them about. Because we are all troublesome morons who shouldn't be wasting their time, I presume.

London 2012 Ticket Ballots - how many tickets to apply for?

2011-03-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

If I had the inclination, and the funds, to buy tickets to the London 2012 Olympics, I would be a very angry person.

The ticket allocation process has been lazily designed to leave the applicant having to make difficult decisions without any information. If I wanted to spend £200 on tickets, how many would I be best advised to apply for?

The most logical approach might be to gamble that I get half of what I asked for, and apply for twice as many events as I really wanted to attend.

But I have to be prepared for the possibility that demand isn't as high as has been expected, in which case I might be allocated all the tickets that I ask for.

If I were rich, that would be a risk that I could afford. But if money is tight, I cannot afford that same gamble, so I would have to apply only for what I could afford, and possibly end up with nothing. (Well done London 2012 - another barrier for the cash-strapped.)

And what if I were thinking of travelling quite a way and only thought it worth the effort if I could get tickets to at least two rounds of the event that really interested me? Again, hard luck: no way to specify this.

Well done to the organisers for avoiding the crudest first-come-first-served bunfight. But what we have is only a little better.

One of the justifications for Britain spending money it can't afford to mount London 2012 is that we can show the world what a brilliant country we are. The ticketing system certainly isn't doing much to boost our reputation.

Where is the imagination and innovation that could create a really intelligent ticket allocation system?

Why can't purchasers list the events they want in order, but specify a maximum spend?

Why can't purchasers specify "I only want to buy one of the following group" so that they can apply for tickets to any of the first-round heats in an event, without the risk that they get more than one?

What about offering a multi-stage allocation process, where you are offered tickets in Round One, and can then accept or reject tickets for each event? Then the rejected tickets are re-allocated and offered to those who didn't get them in round One?

I'm sure there are lots of other innovations that could be added. It would have made for more complicated programming, but I thought that Britain fancied itself as a knowledge economy. And if the website had been well designed, it could actually have made life easier for the user.

Shame on London 2012 for their laziness.

Giving independence the Coalition Way

2011-02-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

Quote from BBC News: "The government has said it will be investing £470m over the next four years in funding for charities and voluntary groups to give them independence from state money."

You only need to translate this to a different context to expose the cant.

What would the media and government reaction be if a parent were to announce that they were going to give their toddler "independence from parental sustenance" by buying them a set of cooking utensils and a few packets of dried food, but thereafter ceasing to take responsibility for feeding them?

Cutting off funds does not "give independence". It has become quite the rage for governments to offer "transitional" funding to help charities develop new funding streams - but the sad truth is that even if much of the work is done by volunteers, helping people costs money - and however hard you look, you're not going to find a way to pay training and admin staff, rents, phone bills or heating costs with fresh air.

If we guess that 10% of the population are beneficiaries of some sort of activity provided by the voluntary and charitable sector, then that £470m works out at £77 per beneficiary.

That's not even £77 per beneficiary to be spent on maintaining the services for a few more months whilst society tries to work how to fill the gaps that Government is leaving by its savage funding cuts.

That is £77 per beneficiary to develop ground-breaking initiatives that will identify and develop replacements for the many streams of public funds (directly from government, via local authorities or PCTs) that current allow voluntary groups and other charities to provide key services to keep life bearable for the vulnerable.

If the Government has found some magical recipe, then give the charities case studies that show how to do this on a replicable basis and save the £470m. If not, then £470m is no more going to help charities work out how to manage without money than it would help bus companies work out how to run without fuel.

If the Government really believe that this "transitional" money will allow the same activities to be delivered for far less, then it is really scary to realise how little they understand.

Or perhaps they fully realise that they are setting off a collapse of a swathe of services that many would consider basic and essential - but they think we are all too dim to spot what they are doing if they wrap it up in cuddly words. Even more scary.

Gigabyte: great products, perhaps - but wretched Customer Service

2010-10-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

When someone bothers to ask a question about your product, there is a pretty good chance that they might buy it, so a little effort in replying promptly and helpfully can be a good investment.

Gigabyte (makers of PC motherboards) seem to think otherwise. I asked them for a detailed spec for the power supply that I would need to feed one of their products - something I had expected (but failed) to find on their website.

It took them one hour short of a week to answer:

The main concern will be Watt, the other part of spec will be depended on basic and standard design of power supply.

Most power supply must follow the standard spec and then make full compatible with motherboards as possible.

Therefore, compatibility will be the concern according to the brand and spec of power supply.

Perhaps I am being a bit dim, but this doesn't seem to be very helpful. Nor timely: had I asked something unique, then I might have thought it OK to wait a week for a carefully-researched answer. But a standard "go away and stop asking silly questions" response, if it has a place at all, should be something that they could manage rather more quickly.

UPS: an insight into their values?

2010-10-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

You can tell a lot about an organisation about how it behaves when things go wrong.

I'd thought well of UPS: reliable deliveries brought by a friendly chap who took his job seriously.

Then a time-critical parcel that failed to arrive on the promised day. At 0430 they had reported it "Out for Delivery" from my local depot. So I waited in - but it never came.

At 1843 that evening, they updated the story:
THE PACKAGE WAS MISSED AT THE UPS FACILITY, UPS WILL DELIVER ON THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY

7 out of 10 for candour (why "missed"? That could meant looked-for-but-not-found, How about "left behind"?).

But 0 out of 10 for Customer Care. I am sure they would want me to believe that this is a very rare slip from their normal high standards. In which case, they can afford to invest some resources to try and minimise the grief. Call me (the package will have a number - if not, I am on the phone directory database). At least email me. Apologise. Offer to deliver on the Saturday morning (the missed delivery was on a Friday: "next business day" is Monday). Give me a credit for a free package. Do something to show me that you understand that your failure is likely to be a problem for me.

But UPS do none of these. Because they don't care? Or because they foul up so often that they can't afford to do much for their victims? It might be neither, but those are the two obvious conclusions that the customer is likely to draw.

UPDATE:

These people get worse. The following day (Saturday) the status changed to "DESTINATION SCAN", timed at 07.38. I know that we took no delivery that morning, and was about to get very very angry with UPS at giving me untrue information. Then I checked their glossary, and learned that on Planet UPS, words have a very different meaning:

Destination Scan
The shipment has arrived at the local UPS facility responsible for final delivery. In what way is their "UPS facility" reasonably described as a "Destination"? I can't believe that this is designed to mislead (their frequent users would soon rumble it). It must be no more than stupidity. Not in some peripheral part of their operation but in the core of their business. Depressing.

Parcelforce: what a dozy outfit

2010-09-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

In a highly competitive marketplace for delivery services, one would presume that basic competence was pretty much assured in any company that had managed to survive for more than a few months.

But Parcelforce seems an exception.

Tracking the progress of a package has become a standard part of the service offering for all national operators, and it makes a big difference. For all customers, it gives the chance of spotting when a time-sensitive item is not going to arrive in time, so a Plan B can be implemented. And for domestic customers, it means that they know whether they need to stay in and await the arrival of a delivery.

But Tracking is only of any use if it is reasonably accurate. That doesn't seem to be true of the Parcelforce system.

Late on 16th September, my supplier told me they had shipped my item by Parcelforce. They hadn't promised me delivery until the 20th - but previous experience suggested this would probably mean delivery the next day.

Checking at lunchtime on 17 September 2010, this is what the Parcelforce Tracking service told me

Good news: it would be good to have the item before the weekend. I stayed in all afternoon on Friday 17th, but there was no sign of Parcelforce. Late in the day, I decided to click through on the "Tracking Details" button, and a second page told a different story:

So - the parcel hadn't reached their "National Hub" (Coventry) until 11am - but an hour or so later, Parcelforce had been reporting that they expected to deliver it to me, in rural Derbyshire, the same day.

Worse still, later that evening (when the item had only just reached Nottingham) they were STILL indicating that they expected to deliver the same day.

And the next morning (Saturday: 18 Sep), here I am with no parcel, and STILL Parcelforce are telling me that their expected delivery date is yesterday.

This error isn't because a member of staff looked up a piece of information and read the wrong line. It wasn't some inexperienced member of staff who didn't understand what they were doing. This isn't even some newly-thought-of extra system that is being bedded in.

This is the standard Parcelforce website system that has been offering Tracking for ages. If they are feeding garbage to me, they are feeding garbage to others. If their system didn't update "Expected Delivery Date" when the parcel arrived at their National Hub after the delivery van had left my Local Hub - then it won't do it for other people.

Conclusion: Parcelforce wouldn't be on my shortlist of companies to entrust with my company's reputation until they have fixed their Tracking service - and explained to me why I should have any confidence in a company that seems happy to deliver such poor service to the end user without doing anything about it.

Calais-Dover: the Limits of Free Enterprise

2010-04-17T01:43:00.000-07:00

As I write, there are apparently large numbers of people unable to fly back to the UK, queued up at Calais, trying to travel as foot passengers on the P&O ferry.

P&O have space for the people - I was last night told by their call centre that the quickest way to get family members back was to take a car out from Dover to Calais, turn round, pick up the family, then come back on the next ferry Calais to Dover. They had space to offer on any ferry I wished.

The problem, the P&O call centre agent explained to me, is with "loading" foot passengers (what a lovely image). Fair enough: with the Booze Cruise market much reduced, I guess there is not a lot of demand in normal times, but where is the Contingency Plan for abnormal times?

And where is the lateral thinking? There are stories this morning of passengers purchasing bicycles in Calais so that they count as "vehicle" passengers and can travel freely. From what I remember, bicycle passengers are asked to wheel their bikes onto the ferry rather than ride. So would it matter so terribly much if they were issued with bicycle-sized pieces of cardboard to carry instead of wheeling a bicycle-sized bicycle? And if that is accepted, would the piece of cardboard really have to be a full-sized image of a bicycle? Would an A4 picture of a bicycle really be much less valid?

And where is the entrepreneurial spirit among the coach operators of Calais? Why no £50-a-head Calais-Dover shuttle coaches using the SeaFrance ferry or Eurotunnel, neither of which take foot passengers?

How to deliver really dreadful online service - TFL

2010-01-17T22:32:00.000-08:00

Transport For London this week demonstrated to me just how to handle Customer Service badly. They emailed to say "Thank you for your email. I apologise for the delay in our response. Thank you for all of your comments and suggestions. Your feedback has been noted and passed on to the relevant department for consideration."

So far so standard - except that they have taken so long to respond that I have absolutely no idea what I had complained about. And being completely indifferent to delivering Customer Service, TFL don't bother to give any hints. Hints like echoing back the query/complaint that I made.

And that is pretty important because ordinary people like you and me don't get to email TFL directly (which would leave a copy of our email on our system). I'm not against being asked to fill out a form (structured information is cheaper and quicker to deal with) but good behaviour requires that the organisation then send the complainant a copy of what has been written.

The only-via-form + no-copy mechanism is ideal for organisations that expect to fail in responding promptly and helpfully - rather like the "would you like the receipt in the bag trick", it reduces the chance that complainants are going to manage to pursue their grievances.

Is it a good way of running an organisation? Does it show you as trustworthy and responsive? Of course not, but it buys an easy life in the short term.

BBC Radio Derby demonstrates the dangers of old web pages

2010-01-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

As I write, BBC Radio Derby - the nominated communication method for news of local school closures - is directing listeners to its website to check on school closures.

In a hurry, I Googled "Radio Derby Schools" and there was last Tuesday's long list of closures. I knew it was last Tuesday's list, because I had twice complained last week that Radio Derby were showing this same out-of-date-list. The casual user could readily have missed the date, seen the name of their local school, and assumed it shut. With A level exams today (and virtually every school actually open), that would be a big big mistake with serious consequences.

I rang Radio Derby this morning to warn them. A patient operator explained that I had made the mistake of looking at an old page that Google seemed intent on indexing, and that if I went to the Radio Derby website, then followed the hierarchy of choices, I would find an up-to-date list, I would find the correct information.

How often I come across people who think that all is OK because they can explain to me the recommended method for finding the correct information. They just won't take the point that if there is also wrong information out there waiting to be found, then they are acting dangerously.

The BBC Radio Derby man did have the decency to say that they knew it was a problem, and claimed that they were broadcasting warnings about this. (They certainly hadn't added any such warning at around 0730 this morning when they referred listeners to the website).

So, they knew of the problem but did nothing to fix it. Brilliant.

Lessons to learn:

When information changes, update the relevant page on your website rather than creating a new one. If you have some rule that prevents your taking down the old info, modify the old page so that there are strong banner messages saying that this is an out-of-date page. Change the text colour to something odd (say pink) so that people can read it but will wonder why it looks odd.
Listen to your complainants (quickly) and allow the possibility that they are sensible people trying to tell you something you need to hear. I complained to the BBC five days ago about the out of date page. Either the BBC was very slow processing my complaints, or it must have assumed that I was a demented idiot.
Give your front-line people training to explain the danger of out-of-date information, and give them emergency procedures for getting things fixed in a hurry.

POSTSCRIPT - the BBC responds (after six days) to my complaint that their School Closure list was nearly 24 hours out of date: "... naturally, it can take longer for all of the regional sites to be updated than to read the lists out" .
A perfect example of complaint-handling as a defensive art ("say anything to shut the complainant up") rather than as an intelligence-gathering exercise ("is this person telling us of a problem that we need to fix?")

Snow on the headlines, why no update on Council websites?

2010-01-04T22:19:00.000-08:00

When the weather gets very cold for many days on end, it becomes very difficult for a Local Authority to keep roads clear of ice and snow.

But why haven't Councils found the wit to come clean with their residents about how things are going? Here in Derbyshire, the temperature has been well below zero for about a week. Progress on roads is in some cases very difficult.

And the Derbyshire County Council website? It has the same content as it would have had last August. Some sensible content about what they reckon to do, and how difficult it can be to keep the roads clear.

But what I need is to know how things are going. "We are having to conserve salt supplies, so we are dosing minor roads less heavily than we would like" would be a useful comment (for example) when those who need to use them are making their plans. Should I deliver a child to a sleepover on the assumption that I will be able to get out and collect them tomorrow? Real lives involve difficult decisions, and Councils can help by providing candid information.

But no - the instinct is to keep the electors from worrying by keeping the truth from them. In our village, road conditions on Sunday suggested that there had not been effective gritting overnight. But enquiries to the County Council receive the assurance that everything was fine.

Why should I need to call and ask? In 2010, technology makes it easy to update websites promptly. Tell us where your vehicles went and when, and how much salt you applied - and then we can make some sense of what we are seeing. If I see that you came out frequently and applied maximum amounts of salt, then I will realise that the problem is a fundamental one. Keep quiet, and I will suspect that you aren't doing what you claim.

Four miles in 6 hours 53 minutes

2010-01-01T01:40:00.000-08:00

New Year's Day is a special day in the calendar, so I wouldn't expect normal public transport. But it seems a bit much for Stagecoach Cumbria to give up entirely, as appears to be the case - and not even to note the fact clearly on timetables. Cumbria County Council's version of the timetable for the main Lake District bus route is silent on Bank Holiday services. The Stagecoach version is worse - implying a seemingly non-existent service: a reasonable person might turn up for a bus marked "Sundays and Bank Holidays" on New Year's Day and hope for a bus. It looks as if they would be in for a long wait.

Traveline Cumbria offer just one New Years Day itinerary for the four miles from Ambleside to Windermere (a prime route in a prime tourist area) - taking 6 hours 53 minutes. This involves catching a coach from Ambleside, through Windermere to Preston, waiting three hours in Preston, then returning on a coach from Preston to Windermere.

The coach operator's site doesn't show any such journey so it is impossible to confirm whether the outbound trip stops at Windermere (it would be amazingly stupid for it not to do so). Does the coach actually run? Who knows: the only way to find out on the day itself would be to walk to the stop and wait -
Traveline Cumbria (publicly funded) promise that their phone lines are manned all year except Christmas Day - but they aren't actually answering the phone on New Year's Day either.

So the message to those who need Public Transport on New Year's Day - sorry, mate - no services, and no clear information about the lack of services either!

UPDATE (Sep 2010)
Traveline were right. The coach does stop in Ambleside and Windermere, but because of the way that the service is licenced, local journeys are not permitted. So the passenger getting on in Ambleside has to travel beyond Windermere - far enough beyond Windermere that the return leg will be long enough (>35 miles I think) to count as non-local. And that means travelling via Preston!

Eurostar: beyond belief

2009-12-20T22:59:00.000-08:00

I am at a complete loss to understand Eurostar's attitude to their customers.

Faced with problems moving their trains through the Channel Tunnel*, their reaction has been to cancel all services, and leave their customers without any alternative transport. Their website suggests that passengers postpone their trips, or claim a refund. The text shows no understanding of their impact on the lives of their customers and their families - let alone the extra severity caused by Christmas.

Eurostar are now offering some compensation (including hotels, but only local transport) to those they have abandoned - there was no mention of this for many hours after they first stopped running. But amazingly, there is no sign of any effort to help their customers travel by alternative means.

This is a company that operates a large fleet of trains, none of which are currently stuck in the tunnel. They may need one or two to test technical solutions, but the vast bulk of the fleet is surely available to move customers between London and Ashford or Dover, and between Calais or Boulogne and Paris/Brussels. Vehicle shuttles (which carry coaches) and ferries are still running across the channel - so it should be perfectly possible to transport their customers between their start and end points, even though it would clearly take longer than normal.

But no, Eurostar have decided that passengers (who don't have any trains at their disposal, and lack the economies of scale to hire coaches or negotiate ferry/shuttle transit) are better placed to fix up replacement transport.

Is this a calculated decision by a company that thinks it has a strong enough monopoly to allow them to treat customers badly, or are they simply out of their depth?

*Note for anyone reading this later:
Very cold weather in Kent and northern France saw Eurostar trains failing as they entered or exited the tunnel due to the change in temperature between cold outside and warm tunnel.

o2 - selectively incompetent

2009-12-16T01:51:00.000-08:00

The company that can transfer your mobile call from cell to cell as your train hurtles along at 125mph ...

... "cannot" automatically refund customers the balance on closed accounts. Not a candid "will not". But "cannot"*.

Accounts for which o2 have an operative Direct Debit. Where the amount that o2 owes the customer is not in disupute.

They "cannot" automatically give back this money, but unfortunately have to sit on the money. They email to say "The balance on your account means you have nothing to pay this month" - but don't even help you find out how to get it back manually.

Somehow, someone has forgotten to enter anything about refunds into the online help system. You have to call them. Enter your mobile number, wait for an operator, give your number again, and ask nicely. Then, and only then, are they able to give back money that they owe to you.

How odd that they should be so capable and slick in other areas, but not in giving back money.

* source: phone call to an agent identifying herself as Amy, c0915 16/12/09

Amazon - endorsing Marketplace scams

2009-12-14T04:06:00.000-08:00

Amazon lend their reputation to "Amazon Marketplace" - a supposedly safe place to trade with suppliers you have never heard of, with the reassurance that Amazon are there to see fair play.

A great idea - but it doesn't actually work that way. Amazon is quite happy to allow traders to impose ludicrous P&P charges - which you can't work out until you have finished your order.

We all understand that nothing is for free - and that postage does cost money. Where Amazon is the supplier, you pay so much for the first item, and then much less for each extra item. That makes sense.

But buy using Marketplace and some traders will charge you the same P&P for each and every item. I assembled a basketfull of stuff at prices that seemed keen but not ludicrous. Cost of items: £19.82. Plus £57.07 for Postage and Packing.

This is a joke. If Amazon really think it important to allow suppliers to quote low item prices which they finance through high P&P charges (and I can't see why this is a good idea) then the user needs to be allowed to work out the attractiveness of the offer by seeing the incremental P&P charge for each purchase - alongside the item price. Amazon could modify their site to do this if they were bothered. But they don't.

As things stand, Amazon are lending their reputation to very dodgy practice. Would you want to do that with your expensively-promoted brand?

Forgotten your railcard? That will be £440 extra, please

2009-12-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

East Midlands trains have announced a new Penalty Fares regime: anyone found on a train without a valid ticket (and that means the right railcard to go with it too) will be charged DOUBLE the full walk-up fare to the next stop.

For passengers making a mistake on a London-Sheffield train that runs fast London-Leicester, that could be a very expensive mistake. Up to FIFTY times the original fare.

Example: a family of two adults and two children travelling to Sheffield on a fast-to-Leicester train from St Pancras. They travel on specific-train tickets bought with a Friends and Family railcard.

The tickets alone will get them through the barriers at St Pancras, so it is quite possible that the first they know of losing (or forgetting) their Railcard is when their ticket is inspected on the train between St Pancras and Leicester.

No railcard means their tickets are invalid. Under the new Penalty Fares regime, it seems that they will be charged £378 immediately (2 x Adult single, 2 x child single London-Leicester - doubled). That will cover them to the next stop at Leicester. Their cheapest option would be to get off at Leicester and buy a replacement railcard, AND new tickets Leicester-Sheffield (because their existing tickets were only valid on the train they have just got off). This will cost them at least another £62 (£36 off-peak singles plus £26 for a replacement railcard). If they chose to stay on the train it would cost £64 for fares Leicester-Sheffield, but they wouldn't need to buy a replacement card).

So - the minimum penalty for losing or forgetting a railcard looks like being £440 (£378 on the train + £36 for fares at Leicester + £26 for a new railcard). This is the penalty for not being able to produce a £26 railcard which is registered on a database to them personally. For a journey that might only have cost them £8.50* in the first place. That's a fine of more than 50 times the fare, or rather more than many families will budget for their summer holiday. Or 75 hours' work at Minimum Wage.

What a brilliant way of encouraging families to travel by train!

Notes

*£8.50 fare offered by trainline and EMT sites at 0906 04/12/09 for travel on 0955 from St Pancras on 14/01/10 made up of two adults at £3.30 and two children at £0.95 after Friend & Family railcard discounts

For a student or Senior Citizen being discovered without their railcard, the penalty would be £153: Double the London-Leicester single fare of £63, plus £27 from Leicester to Sheffield. They might save £6 on the Leicester-Sheffield section if travelling "off-peak".

Wasting money AND giving wretched service: East Midlands Trains

2009-12-01T01:55:00.000-08:00

Answering complaints and enquiries by email is cheaper than answering phone enquiries, if you structure the enquiry/complaint form properly. An agent responding to emails can be loaded close to 100%, with no gaps waiting for calls. The customer has been obliged to compose their thoughts in their own time, rather than doing so whilst the agent listens.

So, how stupid is it for a hard-up organisation to encourage enquiries to be made by phone rather than email?

This is what you get when you fill in an online complaint to East Midlands Trains:

Thank you for getting in touch. Although we aim to respond in 5 working days, you will definitely receive a full response within 20 working days.

20 working days - that is FOUR WEEKS. For a train company, whose enquirers are fairly likely to be asking about something that won't wait four weeks. (In my case, I wanted to know about Engineering Works four weeks ahead, because their online information wasn't working).

They realise the problem, so they add:
In the meantime, if you have any urgent questions or concerns, please call us on 08457 125 678 (option 5, then 3) and we'll be happy to help

So - having invited you to fill in a form, they then acknowledge that this may well not be suitable for your needs, and suggest another approach. Not an alternative (there is no way to retract the enquiry/complaint you have made online) but AS WELL.

So an organisation struggling to deliver competent Customer Service (and that is being kind) not only encourages customers to contact them using a more resource-intensive route, but duplicates work for itself in the process.

Sheer Genius.

Postscript:

I did phone for the information, and suggested to their staff member that they could save themselves work if they warned of their "20-working-day" response standard before inviting online contact. He clearly wasn't programmed to handle such a suggestion, skipping to the next prompt in his script "What is the problem you need help with?". Thick, or rude - I couldn't work out which.

An expensive mistake?

2009-11-24T05:16:00.000-08:00

Along the A6 a it passes through Derbyshire, the observant traveller can see new bus stops with electronic displays:

The display itself looks like this:

The signs have been in position for ages (years rather than months) but have never worked. An enquiry to Derbyshire County Council elicited the information that the funding came from a government grant, and that there was no deadline for successful operation - there are technical difficulties "at the bus end" - and the current position may continue for "some time to come".

I've made a Freedom of Information request to find out how much the project has cost, and when - if ever - it is likely to work.

I'm greatly in favour of good information - where it is useful. I'm not sure that the basic concept here is good: the displays aren't even big enough to show a scrolling display that might convey a really useful message ("the 19.43 has been cancelled" or "the 15.45 is 34 minutes late - catch the next service xxx to Bakewell and change to service xxx there)". Instead, they will just show the number of minutes until the next bus. If the last bus of the day has gone, does it show the number of minutes until the first bus the next day? There doesn't seem to be enough space to show a value of 720, for example.

Update 2010. My FOI request was answered (after a complaint to the Information Commissioner): the project has cost £324,000 and has resulted in 8 non-working bus stops being errected. There is no date for completion of the project. Details at http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/electronic_bus_stop_displays

NB - I found out what the display "T" means. Not "Testing" as I had guessed, but ... "Look at the timetable".

Lazy Local Authorities

2009-11-15T02:01:00.000-08:00

Want to sing carols around a Christmas Tree and sell Mulled Wine? You'll need a Temporary Events Notice - costing £21.

Laying aside the question of whether this sort of event should need a licence, just look at what you have to do to get a licence.

Can you apply online? No - certainly not in the Derbyshire Dales area. Pay by Credit or Debit Card? Nope.

You CAN download a PDF form - but this isn't enabled for online filling-in, so you have to print it out and fill it in by hand. (With details that are virtually the same as you filled in last year but because you can't save it, you have to start all over again - thanks).

And then you have to send the five-page form to two separate places. And in one of those envelopes you have to send three copies of the five pages - so it will need to be sent as a Large Letter, which costs more (and for which you are unlikely to have stamps at home, so requiring a trip to a Post Office).

We've applied for lots of these licences, and have never had a single query. So it seems that there isn't a lot of consideration going on at the Council end. That makes £21 seem a pretty generous payment for receiving a form, checking that it isn't anything exciting, and posting back a rubber-stamped copy to the applicant.

If the Public Sector wants to avoid an anti-Public-Service backlash, how about a campaign to deliver reasonable Customer Service? Nothing fancy - just the simple, obvious stuff. In this case: online application would be pretty obvious. If that is just too ambitious, then how about the council doing the copying? Not many private individuals have photocopiers - councils tend to have several. And it would save on postage, and the environmental cost of moving extra sheets of paper around.

And how about having the council send a copy to the Police, rather than requiring the applicant to make another copy and send it separately?

The current system stinks of authoritarianism and arrogance. Not clever.

How hard is it for buses not to leave early?

2009-05-30T01:55:00.000-07:00

Once again last night, my son missed the early-evening bus to our village because it had left several minutes early. Leaving early is a hassle in a city with a bus every few minutes. In this case, the following bus is nearly five hours later, so it's a big deal.

This particular service is funded by Derbyshire County Council, and I've complained about its early departure before. They appear deaf to the obvious suggestion - that they insist as a condition of their contracts that all drivers are issued with a radio-signal watch or clock that leaves no question as to the exact time. (These cost about £20 each, and some rail companies have issued them to all operating staff for exactly this reason).

Once you have excluded the possibility that a driver has left early because their watch was wrong, you can reasonably get heavy with them through the disciplinary process if they are found to leave early.

How difficult is that? Too difficult for Derbyshire, it seems.

Philips - never again

2009-02-18T01:40:00.000-08:00

I always thought well of Philips. But experience with one of their digital photo frames has me vowing "never again".

Why? Because they refuse (or are too lazy) to specify the power supply details. The most they will give is "•Power consumption: 5 W •Power mode supported: AC powered". Hardly useful.

I had presumed that this was to force you to buy a replacement supply from them at some inflated price. But although the parts specialists do offer very expensive Philips power supplies, none are listed for Photo Frames. A phone call to Philips themselves had them admitting they couldn't find out either.

So - lose or break your power supply and Philips presumably expect you to throw away the Photo Frame and buy a new one.

So that's me finished with Philips.

Update 22nd Feb 09:

I eventually found the power supply. For anyone needing a supply for a Philips 7FF3FPB/05 Photo Frame, it needs 2Amps at 9v DC (no indication of polarity and I had no meter with me). The original that came for ours in the UK was model MU18-2090200-B2.

The Grey-with-rust-streaks Horse of Ebbsfleet

2009-02-11T02:16:00.000-08:00

We bemoan the short-termism that has seen our financial systems needing a bailout. But Britain never learns.

Mark Wallinger's winning design for Ebbsfleet will no doubt be the White Horse that he promises - for a while. Apparently "self-cleaning" white paint is in the specification.

But how long will such paint last - and what happens then?

Boringly rectangular structures can be cleaned and painted by hanging a basket from rails at the top.

But a horse? Lots of overhangs - and no mentions of any provision for hanging anything off the top.

So what happens when the paint needs replacing (or even a bit more cleaning than the self-cleaning action achieves)?

Presumably we leave it to look increasingly shabby - a fitting introduction to short-termist Britain for visitors arriving on the Eurostar.

Toothless Ofcom?

2008-07-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

Ofcom demand that Mobile companies issue the PAC (transfer code) within two working days (or give you an explanation why not).

Six working days after Carphone Warehouse received my Recorded Delivery letter asking for a PAC for my O2 account with them, I'd heard nothing, so rang them.

My first attempt was a failure - their agent hung up when I told them I was recording the call for contractual purposes.

At a second try, the agent (after going away to check) agreed to be recorded. She accepted that they had received the letter but it had not yet been actioned.

Why the delay? She explained that they only collect mail from the PO Box twice a week.

I complained to Ofcom that this system guaranteed that customers were not going to get their codes in the time that Ofcom demanded.

Ofcom's response - "We'll email them to remind them of their obligations". Impressive, eh?

Given that mobile operators stand to make considerable money by delaying the issuing of PAC codes, one would think that Ofcom might need to take a slightly more robust approach (like trying some sample transactions themselves) to keep performance up to scratch.

HP - how to fail at business

2008-06-25T05:09:00.000-07:00

I'd always thought HP pretty capable, but experience this week proves otherwise.

A new K5400 inkjet printer managed just one page before the black packed up. An email support request brought a computer-generated page of instructions - clearly bolted together from a menu, partly in broken English.

When that didn't work, I was referred to UK support for a replacement printhead. No problem (apart from being asked to go through the history all over again - and about 10 minutes on an expensive 0870 line) - they would get me a new printhead in 8-10 working days.

How long? This was HP trying to remedy a failure in a brand new product of theirs. Could they manage faster when the alternative was me rejecting the product and sending it back to the supplier? Nope - the system takes nearly two weeks, and that is the way things work.

When there is an international football match, newspapers arrive in our Derbyshire village at 06.30 showing photos taken after the end of a game at nearly 11pm the previous night. HP don't need to make anything new - just take something off a shelf and stick it in the envelope and post it. And it takes a fortnight.

So back goes the HP printer. I've ordered a Canon instead.

Setanta - how to make sure customers never come back

2008-04-30T07:18:00.001-07:00

Setanta UK make great play of their "No annual contract" terms.

Of course it isn't as attractive as it first seems - there is a joining fee to make sure that you don't just opt out over the summer when there are no football matches to show.

And you have to give 30 days' notice of your intention to stop. Not attractive, but clearly laid out.

What I take exception to is their refusal to take more than 30 days' notice of my intention to stop. They will only take 30 days notice from the day you call up. In that time, they will have one further payment from you - but you won't get a full month for that payment unless you call on exactly the right day.

Example - you first joined on the 8th of the month. You call on 30th April to cancel. Setanta will take a full month's payment from you on 8th May, but will cut off your service on 30th May because that is 30 days from when you called to cancel. Between 30th May and 7th June, you have paid for Setanta service but can't have it. Swizz.

Some people will lost just a day, some will lose nearly a whole month.

Legal - almost certainly. Wise? I reckon not. The nasty taste left by their greedy attitude will make sure that this customer doesn't go back.

For those who do stick with Setanta - pretend to cancel your contract. I was offered a £15 rebate (£5 a month for the next three months) if I stayed. I didn't take it, but it might be worthwhile for you.

Update 9 July 2008
Setanta get worse. Today they have mailed me with an offer where the small print reveals that they have increased their Joining Fee to £20, the minimum period to two months, the notice to 60 days, and the monthly fee to £12.99 (a 30% increase). An interesting way to win customers in a recession!

Credits

2007-09-01T00:10:00.001-07:00

Watch a film, and the end credits list everybody involved in its making - from caterers to accountants.

Thank heavens that this ego-fest hasn't spread to the world of clothing. I used to be in charge of making womens' tights. There were 300 people in the factory, and they all played some part in the creation of the garments. Imagine how big a label it would have taken to give us all a credit.

This rant was prompted by Adobe, whose product Dreamweaver MX 2004 requires you to sit through an interminable list of credits before it will tell you which version you have. I literally had time to go an make a cup of tea whilst the credits rolled (yes - they controlled the scrolling; no cheating and scrolling down to the bottom). And there, at the very bottom was the only piece of information that was required by 99.999% of those checking the "About Dreamweaver" information - the version number. What arrogant people, deciding that they should impose a meaningless listing of their employees.

I don't actually care who wrote my software. Sure, make the information available at the end of a link, so that vain people can show Mum that they have their name up in lights, or so that headhunters know who to try and poach. But let the rest of us show our appreciation by buying the product.

Defining a Price

2007-05-25T23:52:00.000-07:00

One of the basic roles for a government is to set rules.

Rules that stop people hurting each other, but also rules that make life run smoothly.

Governments define what a litre is, and what Unleaded petrol is. So when I see unleaded petrol at 96.9p per litre, I know that this is better value than unleaded petrol at 97.9p per litre. Without these rules, we might find that a Cheapco litre was only 97% as big as a Shell litre, and we would need our passenger to carry binoculars (to read the details of how big their litres were, and what octane their unleaded fuel was) and a calculator to allow us to compare the various deals on offer along the highway.

It's about time that the UK government defined what a "price" is. As in "the total amount of money that the purchaser has to pay to obtain the product or service offered". If an "extra" is compulsory, then it goes in the "price". If the customer is truly free to take it or leave it, then it can be excluded from the price as long as there is a ready way of establishing what is in the price and what isn't - every time the price is mentioned.

As retailers and service providers have got more creative, so the gap between headline price and actual price has become bigger, and the hassle for the citizen bigger. We have to bring up children never to believe that they will be able to obtain an offer at the advertised price - to teach them to decode the small print and the nasty tricks that make up the gap between the "price" that is offered and the true cost.

When I buy a pair of boxer-shorts I expect the price to include not only the cloth, but also the cutting out, and sewing together of it, its transportation to the shop and its packaging. I don't get asked for a "sewing machine replacement fee" or a "rear seam overlocking charge". The boxers cost £2.99 and that price includes all the odds and ends that go into making them available to me. Nice and simple. (Note to film industry - the label includes a mercifully short list of credits. Imagine the size of the label if everyone involved got their own mention as at the end of a film).

Airlines are particularly high-profile users of the compulsory "extra". Travel from Norwich airport, and there is an extra £3 "Airport Development Fee" to be paid by the departing passenger at the airport. It is not an option that some people will choose and others decline. Whatever the operators want to call it - everyone has to pay it, so it is part of the price.

You don't need to get too fancy with the rules about prices. The rule simply needs to specify that the prominence and positioning of all compulsory elements of a price must be the same, as must the total compulsory price. So if an airline wants to list flights from London to Paris at "£10", then they are free to advertise "London to Paris: £10 fare + £13 airport departure fee + £10 government tax + £0.40 minimum payment fee = £33.40 total price" - as long as all the type was in the same block, in the same font, size and weight. I think they would soon find out that passengers aren't terribly interested in the breakdown of the price, and that simply showing the total price would work best in their advertising.

Similarly, a restaurant applying a 10% compulsory "service charge" would have to show the service charge and total cost against each item. They would be completely free to do this, but they would probably find that customers preferred a smaller menu showning just one figure for price - the amount that they have to pay in order to buy the item.

If the current government won't take up this simple legislative change, wouldn't this be a nice, cheap, popular move for an opposition party to promise? It would cost virtually nothing to implement and it would help ordinary people get on with their lives with just a little bit less hassle.

Cheeky Charge at Norwich Airport

2007-05-25T23:42:00.000-07:00

Passengers leaving from Norwich Airport are having to pay an extra £3 "Airport Development Fee" - on top of the charge they paid for airport fees and departure taxes when they bought their ticket. This is really cheeky.

Apart from the issue of the "compulsory extra" (see my separate note on this), there is the issue of why passengers should be asked for an extra contribution to future development. From the vox-pop interviews I have heard on the issue, many appear to feel it is OK to be charged like this because it is building a better facility they will enjoy in the future.

Well, sort of. But they are not (as they seem to imagine) making a contribution to developing a communally-owned asset. They are making an extra payment to an 80.1%-commercial company that owns the airport, and the commercial interests will benefit from 80.1% of the extra income from the extra people using the developed airport. (See http://www.omniport.co.uk/).

Will we next see National Express hitting passengers for an extra on top of their coach fee to help them buy more coaches?

Ebay - why do they make things worse than they need be?

2007-04-07T22:42:00.000-07:00

Ebay is a brilliant idea.

But any unregulated marketplace is a scary place. From very early days, those organising street markets made sure that someone offering a pound of butter actually gave a full pound. And any Stock Market (which must be about as pure a marketplace as exists) would act immediately if the person offered a particular type of stock was fobbed off with something inferior.

Arguments about condition of items are probably insoluble. I can understand why eBay stands back from "It was perfect when it left me" disputes.

Yet there are a couple of areas where eBay seems happy to sit back and watch customers being treated badly when there are simple (and low-cost) remedies they could apply. eBay doesn't like feedback (there seems no way to tell them what they are doing wrong) - so I am trying to obey my "don't moan unless you have let people fix it" rule by writing up my ideas here.

Checking on Poor Feedback
The Feedback system is the only protection that the customer has against low-value ripoffs. The customer can happily check the feedback rating for a buyer or seller. They can see total statistics. And they can scroll back through recent comments. But there is no way (or none that I could find) that allows you to read just the neutral or negative comments. Given the very blunt tool that the Feedback system represents, the subtleties of comments are crucial.

Obvious Solution: eBay need to offer an option to list just Negative, just Neutral or just Positive feedback. Why don't they? It would cost peanuts to program, and it would help customers feel more confident in buying through eBay. What does eBay have to lose?

VAT and other Sales Taxes

eBay allow sellers to show prices that exclude Sales Tax, and to bury a statment that "Sales Tax will be added to the final price" as obscurely as they wish.

I got hit this week with an item where the intention to add sales tax was buried in a mass of other terms. I pressed a button that said "Commit to Buy" opposite the price I expected to pay, and then - after committing - I got told the actual amount I had promised to pay.

Does eBay think that customers won't care about this? My loss was only a few pounds, but I felt really stung. The destruction of my goodwill towards eBay - and the cost to eBay of my telling the cautionary story in the pub - is far higher than the possible benefit to them (in that I might not have bid if I had realised the true cost).

The taxi driver in a large city has a clear economic interest in ripping people off because they will be financially better off by taking the money from a person who is unlikely to be using them again whether happy or upset. (That is not a criticism of taxi drivers, just a reflection on the outcomes of the "game" that applies in that context).

But the game for eBay is different. Make me nervous about buying through eBay, and they lose out on the commissions on my possible future purchases.

Given that every buyer is registered with eBay, and therefore their location is known, there is no clear reason why all prices could not be displayed as inclusive of applicable sales tax. At the very least, the taxes need to be shown explicitly immediately after pressing the "Bid" button but before committing to buy.

eBay doesn't need to listen to customers. But it would perform better if it did. Its owners are losing value by allowing the management to discourage users from telling them how they could make more.

H5N1 Turkey: the meat may be safe once cooked ...

2007-02-09T05:14:00.000-08:00

... but what about the blood that drips off the meat when unwrapped from its packaging? Or the blood left on the chopping board that then goes into the washing-up bowl? Or the blood wiped up by the kitchen cloth?

The H5N1 virus is apparently killed by exposure to 70 degrees C for just one second. That does make it unlikely that cooked meat would infect humans.

But to believe that blood of infected turkeys is OK to handle in a domestic kitchen? That seems like blind optimism.

Is silence on this a result of lack of foresight, or a wish to "maintain public confidence" whatever the actual risk?

Postscript - the Food Standards Agency website has a wonderful example of how to hide a scary message in soothing prose:

"Our long standing advice is that you should always wash your hands after handling raw poultry meat and eggs to avoid contamination from any bugs. In countries where avian flu is present in poultry, this will also help prevent contamination with the virus."

Thank heavens they aren't responsible for giving Road Safety advice. They'd come up with something like: "Our long standing advice is always to open your eyes before crossing a road. On roads with traffic, this will help prevent injury." Most people would expect to hear something more like: "Roads are dangerous, and you can get killed if you try to cross the road with your eyes closed".

The dangers of parking at Liverpool Airport

2007-02-09T01:50:00.000-08:00

Liverpool airport tried to hit me for a £10 admin fee when their system took an erroneous payment from me.

Airport parking has become another example of the "book ahead or pay a penalty" culture.

Book ahead to park at Liverpool Airport, and you will pay usefully less than if you just show up unbooked. But where other airports seem to have a robust system for handling advance bookings, the Liverpool system has a big flaw in it: beware.

Having booked, you don't get a voucher - just a booking reference. The instructions (at least when I parked there in October 2006) were to note the number to quote if necessary, but that this would probably not be needed, as their system would identify me on exit from my Credit Card number.

Because the advance-booker has no ticket of any kind, the system relies on your inserting the same credit card as you booked with into the exit machine. There was no help button I could find, and the area is badly lit.

In my case, I put in my wife's Credit Card by mistake - but I could as easily have misremembered which of my credit cards I had used originally, or I could even have had a new credit card number issued by my bank. In any of these cases, inserting the credit card into the exit machine does not ask you to confirm that you want to pay as an unbooked customer. It simply helps itself to your funds (no PIN required) and tells you it has done so.

Call the airport, and you learn that they will only refund part of the erroneous payment - they want to keep £10 for Admin Costs. Amazed by the bare-faced greed of this, I checked with the head of Marketing at Peel Holdings as to whether this was really right - he bounced me straight back to the airport, who insisted that they were going to keep £10.

I disputed the transaction with my Credit Card company - I pointed out that I had inserted the card for the purpose of indentification and not for the purpose of authorising a payment. After a lot of form-filling and a two-month wait, I got the full refund.

But it shouldn't be like this. If Peel Holdings install a system that uses credit cards ambiguously (the card has to be inserted into the same slot whether for indentification or for payment, and the system does not ask the user which they intend) - then the very least they need to do is to refund fully and promptly when a payment is taken wrongly.

Their conduct with me suggests that they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can mug from their users than with any concept of decent behaviour.

Advertising Standards Agency - not really keen on complaints

2007-02-01T02:15:00.000-08:00

The Advertising Standards Authority should encourage whistleblowing against dishonest advertising. Every time a consumer finds that an advert has misled them, they are going to pay less attention to similar ads - and that will hit honest advertisers as much as it will hit the cheats.

But try complaining to Advertising Standards and you find:

Their online form is designed by a pedant or an idiot. Tell them that you are complaining about Direct Mail, and it demands that you tell them where you saw it. In the kitchen? Living Room? On the train opening my mail just as I went through Haywards Heath? What does it matter? This is a stupid question to ask about Direct Mail, and the person who speicified that the webform should demand an answer for such a meaningless combineation needs a bit of re-education.
You are required to send them a copy of Direct Mail materials (sensible enough) - but if you choose to scan the document (which will be the most convenient option for many complainants), the system has a fixed limit of three documents. The direct mail item I scanned was larger than A4, and double-sided. That makes four scan documents. Not allowed
If you try sending a large document (I resorted to zipping my four documents into a single file), their system times out and you lose all the information you have typed in. (This happened twice, with Firefox and with Opera browsers).
There is a "send us the item by post" option, but it is an ordinary mailing address - which adds the hurdle of getting the item into the post, and finding a stamp. If they had the wit (or generosity) to offer a Freepost address, fewer people would decide not to bother, or not get round to sending the offending item.

So, a pretty pathetic experience. Is the ASA a bit of a fig-leaf?

How to stop scaring the hard-up off the railways

2007-01-10T03:12:00.000-08:00

If there is a serious intention to encourage the use of public transport, then action is needed to make its use less scary for the hard-up.

I could take two adults and four children from Sheffield to London for under £15 each way (cheapest advance-purchase tickets, with a family railcard). But if I discovered on the train that I had lost or forgotten our family railcard, the on-train ticket collector would demand £284 "full single fare" (Note 1) for the journey. If a public transport holdup in London missed us the train home, the ticket office would want £147 (Note 2) from me to get us back on a later train. The same cost would apply if we lost (or forgot) our tickets.

These are enormous penalties for anyone - and unthinkable for anyone on a tight budget.

I know that there are people out there trying to defraud the railway companies, but surely this is the wrong balance.

If I forget my railcard, then make me buy a new one for the original £20 - enough of a deterrent to stop me forgetting it on purpose.

If I lose my fixed-train tickets, make me pay the full walk-up price initially, but refund this to me, less a sensible admin fee, when the audit trail shows that I had bought valid tickets. There is no scope for using the "missing" tickets again on another train - they are only valid on the specified train. I know that I might have given the tickets to my friends further up the same train, but that isn't insurmountable. Give each ticket collector a list of advance-purchase tickets bought (with selling location, date and seat numbers) and then he can work out where the lost-ticket passengers should be seated. If there's someone else in those seats, check their tickets - if they have the "missing tickets" then prosecute. Normally, you will be dealing with error rather than fraud and you'll avoid spoiling someone's day, and avoide yet another public transport horror story doing the rounds of pubs and school-gate conversations.

And if I miss my train with company B because of a late-running train by Company A? Higher-price through ticketholders may well manage to get home without paying extra, but if I have bought separate tickets for parts of the journey, missed connections are my problem - and I'm looking at that £129 extra again.

Fair? Hardly. Desirable - certainly not. A fragmented railway industry makes it harder to verify delays, but that is a problem for the industry - if we want the public to feel OK about using trains, we shouldn't be penalising them for the complexities of the structure.

Notes:

Note 1: Once on a train, only full single and return fares are available - and without your railcard, tickets bought at a railcard fare are invalid. You are therefore faced with paying the full single fare, without any railcard discounts (because you don't have a railcard with you and you cannot buy a railcard on the train).

Note 2: Fixed-train tickets have no value except on that train. Miss the train and you are faced with buying new tickets at a ticket office. You can use your railcard (or buy a replacement railcard on the spot), but you cannot benefit from advance-purchase tickets (because you have already missed your train and so want to travel soon) - so get hit with the "full single" fare - albeit qualifying for the railcard discount.

Trading Standards - corrections not welcome

2006-11-11T02:39:00.000-08:00

If you are trying to find out about Trading Standards, it seems that all roads lead to www.tradingstandards.gov.uk - a site that has quite a lot of useful information, but which seems to offer absolutely no way in which the user can feedback on errors.

If you search for information on the law regarding "Hotels" (using the Site Search - which doesn't work with Firefox browsers) the results include a document mis-labelled as applying to England, Wales and Northern Ireland - when a small note at the bottom of the document actually reveals that it applies to Scotland only. I wanted to report this, and to suggest that the geographical scope of each document would best be put at the top so that the user could spot any other errors before wasting time reading the whole document.

How does the public-spirited person tell "Trading Standards Central" this?

It seems that you don't. Their website offers no contact details, and its Site Search offers no hits for "Webmaster" or anything else I could think might help. The authors of the site appear to be a company that doesn't bother to have its own website - attempts to find them lead back to ... the same website that has the problems.

There is no fax number offered, and no phone number.

I can forgive people making mistakes, but what sort of organisation is it that is so reluctant to hear about problems that they make it impossible to tell them?

No cheap train trips for the young or the poor?

2006-11-07T23:08:00.000-08:00

Under-18s (and some people on low incomes) are being prevented from buying lower-priced rail tickets

If it's not easy to get to a staffed railway station (and from where I live the nearest is a 30-mile round trip), then travelling any distance by train affordably means that you are going to have to book in advance, online - it can cost nine times as much if you just show up at the station and buy a "walk-up" ticket.

But if you are under 18, you can't. Nor can you if you are a migrant worker who can't yet open a proper bank or credit card account. Or just someone who doesn't feel they want to risk running up a debt.

Why, because Trainline (the quasi-monopolist who run the largest online website, and provide the engine for every other service, as far as I can see) won't accept Maestro Solo or Visa Electron cards online. And those are the only cards that an under-18 (or someone without a credit history) is likely to be offered by a bank.

Why? Trainline only reveal "This is due to the nature of these cards, which are issued under different agreements." - not exactly illuminating.

My guess is that the acceptance procedure is more complicated: these cards don't allow you to overdraw, so authorisation requires a realtime check with the issuing bank - they need to confirm that there is enough in the account to pay for the transaction. And that seems to be more effort than Trainline can be bothered with.

It is clearly possible to manage online purchases with these cards - teenagers are happily buying lots of online stuff with these cards.

If Trainline were one of several alternative online booking systems, it might be OK to let market economics persuade them that they would lose business to a competitor that was willing to take the trouble to get their systems working with these cards.

But as a quasi-monopolist, Trainline's laziness is more of a worry.

Banks spend a small fortune subsidising children's accounts - to get them settled as customers at a young age. The BBC used to give out free "Radio 4 sampler" tapes to new students for the same purpose.

We need to encourage youngsters to get familiar with booking a train trip when they want to travel.

So shouldn't someone be kicking bottoms at Trainline to stop them actively preventing youngsters from using our trains?

eBay doesn't do Zero

2006-11-05T22:44:00.000-08:00

Once a child has learnt to count to ten, they are introduced to the concept of "Place Value" and the concept of Zero as a placeholder - that a "2" in the "tens" column means 20 - and that we use the zero to fill the columns that don't have a value.

Most kids get this by the time they are seven or eight.

eBay doesn't understand Zero or "Place Value". Look down a list of items for auction - in "finishes soonest" order to see when the auction ends and you see something like this:

At a first glance, the "7d 49m" and "9d 34m" look as if they are out of order, but in fact, this list is in strict time order. It seems that eBay just don't do zero. A simple fix to their software could change "7d 49m" to "7d 00h 49m" and the user could run their eye down the column of figures with much greater ease.

I've written to eBay(tricky if you are trying to tell them something they don't explicitly expect you to be saying to them, but I persevered) and they have acknowledged my response - and done nothing.

How wonderful it must be to work for a company that is so affluent and powerful that it can afford to be so lazy.

How can Government Departments be so dim?

2006-11-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

Getting people to make enquiries by email, rather than phone, can save a lot of resources. But people aren't going to use email unless you offer a sensible turn-around time for replies.

If you had lots of enquiries coming at you, how would you rather they arrived:

As email, which:

obliges the author to think about exactly what they are asking (without taking your time while they do it)
can be queued up so that the enquiry handlers' time can be used efficiently
may be readily dealt with by sending a ready-made reply, so saving lots of effort

OR

as a Phone call, which:

may involve the caller rambling before you can find out what they really want
which requires you to deal with it in "real time" - you can only queue it up for a few minutes
cannot really be offered a "recorded announcement" even if the question they ask is one that you often encounter

But try being a good cost-concerned citizen, and what do you find? Whilst standards for answering the phone are measured in minutes, or even seconds, the target for responding to emails is rather more leisurely.

The last time I needed to contact DCMS - Department of Culture, Media and Sport - a couple of weeks ago, they promised of a response "within 20 working days" if I chose to use email.

So I phoned instead - and got a same-day answer, but probably used up considerably more Civil Servant time than if I had used email.

# posted by John Geddes @ 11:26 AM 0 comments links to this post

Ryanair: institutional contempt for passengers?

2006-11-03T03:37:00.000-08:00

Buy a Ryanair ticket, and you get told very firmly: Check in at least 40 minutes before you fly, or you don't go. Firm, but at least clear from the outset.

But when you do check in, you discover an extra rule - be at the Departure Gate by the time written on your Boarding Pass or you don't fly. It says this in big red letters on the back of the Boarding Pass.

On the surface, that seems fair enough too. But wait. The time they are demanding you get to the gate is (from two recent experiences) 40 minutes before takeoff. So if you check in close to the deadline there is no possible way that you are going to meet this rule. And whilst they clearly do need you to be at the gate in time to load the plane, when did you ever see the doors of a Ryanair flight closed at even 25 minutes before takeoff?

Example from Liverpool Airport:

Departure at 06.30
Check-in deadline 05.50
Gate deadline 05.50

So if you check in at 05.40 (10 minutes clear of the deadline that you were given when booking) you find that you have just 10 minutes to get through security, and walk to the gate. At larger airports the walking alone could take more than that. And queues for security can take far, far longer at any airport.

Ryanair know this, but they still tell passengers that 40-minute checkin is acceptable, and then issue an impossible-to-appease threat to the passenger who has met their rule.

Experienced travellers know when they can get away with 40-minute checkin and when that is dangerous. And they know that as long as you have managed to check in a bag, then being late at the gate is the airline's problem rather than yours - if they did want to fly without you, security rules require that they would have to leave your checked-in bag behind too, and currently that involves going through the bags in the hold, one by one to find yours (RFID may change this, I guess). And that is not a five-minute task.

But less-experienced passengers won't know that this an empty threat. And these people will suffer a lot of extra - and quite unnecessary - stress from reaching the 40-minute "gate deadline" time when they are still stuck in a queue for security.

At the very least this extra stress makes flying less pleasant, and reduces passengers' propensity to travel in future. At worst, the passengers' extra stress adds to the general stress in the queues, and makes life more miserable for even the experienced travellers. One might expect this to excite Ryanair as important, but seemingly not.

And (although I am sure that this doesn't excite Rynaiar at all) I guess that airport security staff would preferred dealing with less-stressed passengers.

Why do Ryanair do it?

When it comes to earning money, Ryanair don't miss a trick. But one occasionally one wonders whether their approach to Customer Care is a little warped. In choosing a low-frills airline, the customer should understand that some of the missing "frills" will be in Customer Service. But at Ryanair, one sometimes senses that they have developed an institutional indifference to the customer's sensibilities - and some of what they do makes you wonder if they are getting close to downright contempt for their passengers.

Once upon a time, I used to write directly to companies about this sort of idiocy, but the rarity of a sensible reply led me to give that up as a waste of time. But if anyone from Ryanair does happen upon this item, I would be pleased to add your comments to this posting.