It’s handy until you actually make use of it… and then you get the following message:

I’d like to draw your attention to the first line, which reads: “Please be reminded that enquiries submitted via the ‘Comment on this page’ form will be ignored.”

Hmmm… thanks…

Presumably “enquiries” are different to “comments” and the LSE gets lots of “enquiries” submitted via the “Comment on this page” form, but who’s to know? My comment was an enquiry (at least as far as I understand the word) so maybe I’ll be ignored too? I’ve gotten used to it over the years…

UPDATE: I wasn’t ignored at all. I got a lovely response an hour later. Maybe I’ll look for the “Comment on our ‘Comment on this page’ function”?

Playing Backgammon

So my backgammon gambling usually takes place on rainy cold lunchtimes at work (where I do have Parallels) where I can fire up Windows and lose my money in a slightly convoluted manner.

PartyGammon seemed like fun, I signed-up and paid my money and I think they even matched my initial deposit as a singing-up bonus. I lost a couple of times, I won fewer, but mainly because there are other things to do at lunchtime I didn’t log in and play for six months. I don’t think this is unusual? What I didn’t expect was to receive an email telling me that “A £3.96 administration fee has been charged to [my] inactive account.”

I had to read the email a couple of times to understand quite what they meant. I hadn’t used my account for the last six months so they defined it as “Inactive” and charged me nearly four UK pounds to maintain it. And what’s more, they would have continued to charge me £3.96 every month until I made my account active again. And to re-activate my account and avoid any more penalty fees, I have to play more games or add more cash to my balance! I can’t just log in to keep my account active, I have to pay them more money!

Of course, reading carefully is something I should have done with the Terms and Conditions when I first signed-up – but fortunately PartyGammon were thoughtful enough to include a highlight of the relevant section of the terms and conditions in the email they sent me (do you think they’ve had complaints in the past!).

Unfortunately, the terms and conditions are pretty clear – I’m definitely guilty of not having played enough PartyGammon. My real question is, what is this money used for and why should should it have been levied anyway? Do the bytes that make up my account details, sitting on a webserver somewhere, cost that much? I expect it is possible to calculate how much holding my account costs PartyGammon in terms of disk space and electricity but I’d be willing to bet it isn’t nearly four pounds a month.

Certainly none of my other accounts charge me for inactivity. Why would they? Why would you charge people who don’t come back? What kind of incentive is that?

For example, I once had some photos developed at one online store and created an account with them in order to get it done. I probably haven’t used it in a year but do I get charged? No, I get promotional emails telling me about great deals for returning customers. This seems to be the sensible, obvious thing to do. Create customers who believe they are getting a good deal, don’t charge them for failing to use your product.

I’m always a sucker for winding myself up, so I thought I’d ask PartyGammon why I had been charged. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the first response was pretty much “you agreed to the terms and conditions”. The second was just obscure: “Please note that the inactive account charges were a business decision.”. Well…yeah. That’s a pretty easy business decision, I wonder how much the consultants were paind for that one? “You have users with cash in their account but aren’t playing? Get that money off ‘em in charges!”. An easy decision but a stupid one!

Summary

I know £4 isn’t a lot of money (and it really isn’t the point of this article) but I’m unlikely to ever play backgammon at PartyGammon again and my lasting impressions are negative ones. This isn’t how you should leave customers feeling. Is it?

An email is the same as a letter

Ticketmaster is “the world’s leading ticketing company, operating in 19 global markets, providing ticket sales, ticket resale services, marketing and distribution and one of the largest e-commerce sites on the internet, and approximately 6,500 retail outlets; and 20 worldwide call centres.”

They are pretty big fish and probably send out an awful lot of tickets. I’d applaud them for developing a ticketing solution which reduces the amount of letters they have to send out.

Of course, they have developed such a solution and they call it TicketFast®. And it’s pretty Fast®. Instead of opting to receive a pair of tickets in the post, I can choose to receive them as an e-ticket in a PDF via a link in an email. The email arrives Quickly® and works fine, but it costs the same as the letter?! How does that work out? And how do they have the nerve to plaster the A4 e-ticket with adverts? At the very least I should get ad-free tickets if I’ve paid for them?

Try asking them about this via their website and your frustration quickly escalates. It’s not easy; you have to view an existing FAQ and then let them know that FAQ doesn’t answer your question. At which point you can finally ask yours, but not before re-entering all your account info (despite the fact you have to be logged in to ask the question in the first place). Anyway, I worked it out and I asked the question. I’ll let you know what they say. Who knows, it’ll probably have been a business decision…

Summary and comments

I haven’t heard anything from Ticketmaster yet (24 hours later) but who knows, they might come back with something. If they do, I’ll let you know.