A quick one for a Friday morning.
Halifax have come up with a great way to retain customers and propsects. Make it impossible to unsubscribe from their marketing. Ok, it might be a glitch but as I went through the double confirmation process to unsubscribe from their share dealing marketing material - yes I know the tax year is about to end and no I don’t want your ISA - I was presented with this screen…
Nice one Halifax. Let’s hope the rest of your online experience is superior to this.
I’m not planning to take the stock market by storm but thought it was about time I signed up a share dealing account. I’ve been an interested, occasional reader of the Interactive Investor website (www.iii.co.uk) for many years and use it to track a few funds I signed up to at the height of the dotcom era. Needless to say I could have done better by stuffing the money in an old sock.
Give I was already registered I thought that I’d use iii for stock trading but you have to go through another registration process first. I can handle that but can’t handle the stuff that demonstrates this established online company hasn’t even got the basics right fills me with doubt that I’ll ever trade with them. Here are a few of the more frustrating things:
1. Debt card issue number - No matter what I did it would not accept ‘3′ as the issue number. I changed and checked everything time and time again. Every time it just came back and said ‘invalid issue number’. I then discovered i needed to enter it as ‘03′. Of course, my mistake.
2. Terms and Conditions. I never read them. Do you? On this occasion I thought I would. I also had to do the usual, tick the box, to show I’d read them. So I clicked the link. Broken. I ticked the box anyway.
3. So I recevied my confirmation email and thought I’d reply to let them know the link was broken. The email is pictured below. Notice anything contradictory? Who sent the mail, who should I contact, what does it say at the bottom?
How many people must sign up to this account each week? Why must these little things continue to happen?
I’ll be sending the email to the address given with a link to this blog. Perhaps if Interactive Investor followed the lead of other stock trading companies like Wasabe I’d be straight on the phone to the CEO. Read the news article on this in Business Week. You might say that only small companies can do this. Well Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon is reading customer feedback daily. You can hear how he listens to customers on this BBC radio programme. The bigger you are, the more you need to listen. Don’t you think?
Why do so many websites not work? Eurostar’s never seems to work. You have to phone up, ask them not to charge you £5 for the privilege of buying a ticket from them because their site won’t take a booking for free.
Here’s a good one - it asks you to fill in the origin of the journey, but the box for that is missing.
The staff are obviously used to the web site not working, because they don’t ask what the problem is, or remotely suggest that they are interested in getting it fixed (that’s one for the WOCAS process www.budd.uk.com/wocas.html ). Feedback from customers and agents, so powerful but so few companies are geared up to use it - fast+systematically.
Still at least it was simple to find the Eurostar phone number under customer support.
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