I have been extremely busy recently – working away from home for weeks on end and naturally very busy when I come home to my family. On Saturday (17th March) I realised that I didn’t have an application form. I quickly fired up the internet and to my horror discovered that I could no longer order one on-line! Bugger! However, according to the RA web site I could order one over the phone Monday to Friday between 10 am and 5 pm. Knowing that Friday 23rd was the last day for application form submissions, I anxiously tried calling the RA at 10 am this morning (19th) – only to hear from a machine saying that it was no longer possible to get application forms over the phone and that you had to come into the RA and collect the forms in person. “Oh dear” I said to myself – NOT! I said something altogether stronger and completely unrepeatable!
What on earth is wrong with their technology? One of the huge benefits of the internet is that you can let people self-serve and save a lot of time and money – and give a better customer experience. Why on earth would they stop allowing people to order on-line and force them to use a labour-intensive, cumbersome, technology – like a phone and a human at the other end? It was so annoying. There was no way to speak to a human. The call just hung up after the message.
Quickly considering my options, I thought: “I’m a Friend, I’ll ring up the Friends department and surely they will be able to help me?” They couldn’t or wouldn’t. I pleaded with them. It was somehow impossible for someone in the Friends’ department to walk over to the information section, put a form in the post and sent it to me! Despite pleading with them that I have been a Friend for over twenty years, and the alternative is that I come in from over a hundred miles away just to pick up a form – they said they couldn’t help me. This is the problem with charities and other non-commercial institutions – they don’t do customer service, and they can’t bend a rule here and there and user their initiative. Bloody infuriating!
I pondered the possibility of getting a biker to pick up the form and either post it Special Delivery or bring it up to the Fens. I thought better of it. Too much to go wrong. I resigned myself to make a fleeting journey into London and pick the darn thing up myself…
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