It appears I was right on the money about the TV Licensing people failing to manage properly their transition to online sales.
Regulars will recall the credit card refund fankle that ensued after yours truly unwittingly managed to buy a black and white licence instead of a colour one. Now, here’s the sequel.
Having received the colour licence in the post and then ‘applying’ for a credit card refund for the black and white one, a letter arrived. It told me: “I have checked our records and can only trace one card payment of £44.00. This was made online on 4 December 2006. Unfortunately, due to an error on our part, a colour licence, No. 11xxxxxxxx, was issued incorrectly against the mono payment.
“Could you please check your card statements, and if only the mono fee is found, authorise us to take the remaining £87.50.”
The upshot, then, is that I got my colour telly licence for the knock down price of £44 due to a slip of the mouse and a sloppy back end operation. I will, of course, be scrutinizing my credit card bills closely…
The message is, as was previously stated, legacy business processes – and thinking - usually don’t work online. There can be few more glaring examples of this than trying to use a TV licence refund form to action a credit card refund.
All of this applies equally to anyone trading online, be it a government agency, a blue chip company, or a small to micro-sized company. Doing business on the web requires back to square one planning, a complete redesign of business systems to suit the new trading environment. What may be tempting and convenient to do is to press into service an offline process and use that for a function for which it clearly wasn’t designed. The outcome can only ever be as satisfactory as trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole.
