Now let me see…. “Do you wish to confirm this ticket?”… Yes… “Enter your Credit or Debit Card details from the selection below”… OK, but wait a minute you haven’t given me an option to use my Debit Card, that can’t be right… “Your card is rejected…ending transaction”… WAIT COME BACK…
If this brief scenario is familiar to you then it is likely that you are one of thousands of customers who have difficulties everyday in buying travel tickets on line. What should be a simple and pain free business transaction is all too often an elongated nightmare that is brought about by a combination of badly designed or ambiguous input systems, poor software or poorly maintained websites.
I recently arrived at a Belfast airport to check in for a prebooked flight, entered my booking reference number only to have it rejected. On taking the matter up with the desk I was informed that I should not have been given a reference number as the system didn’t have me listed on any flight! Further, the planned flight was full and there was nothing they could do for me. Bahhh.
On an earlier occasion my wife was prebooked on a 6.30am flight from Dublin to Lisbon only to discover on arrival at Dublin Airport that the airline had discontinued that service two weeks previously without telling the passengers.
On a similar note I had reason to book a ferry ticket some weeks ago only to discover that while the ferry operator’s website gave the sailing times there was no capacity to book an outward journey. Assuming the booking system to be broken I endeavoured to call the shipping line but a telephone filtering system merely directed me to the website.
One can look at these experiences as being the typical hurdles of modern life like trying to get an appointment with a dentist, returning garments to a store because they shrank to the size of a mobile phone on the first wash, or returning your car to the garage because it failed its MOT an hour after it was serviced. However, in a modern world where access to services is optimum and competitive such experiences are frankly unacceptable.
Part of the problem is that the roll out of Internet access has been matched by an attitude of customer detatchment on the part of many companies who no longer feel any responsibility for customer cultivation. The one to one relationships have been replaced by impersonal input screens. Such businesses need to reflect on the value of customer retention and loyalty because if then don’t, pretty soon they are going to find that they have an unsustainable business on their hands. We have been through a major recession and the public is losing its patience with shoddy service and can be punishingly cruel in that regard.
Now where was that phone number?… “All our operators are busy…Please continue to hold or book on line through our website”….AHHHH!
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