I today expected once more a bad example of an integration of applications within a company. Ticketcorner, a company selling event tickets and taking huge pre-sales fees for this business in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, has about three different channels for us customers and different formats of tickets.
As a fan of Swiss National League A ice hockey, I wanted to purchase on Friday a ticket for the match of my favoured team for Saturday. This should not be such a big deal, since we are at the beginning of the season, so I did not expect that much people coming for this match. And additionally I can order my tickets online via Ticketcorner.ch and use the so called "Print@home"-function to print out my tickets at home, without going to a point of sale. Additionally the company promises that you can exactly choose your seat via the internet portal.
Now I sit there, late night on Thursday, trying to order my tickets for the desired seats, but I had no chance to change the seats. And there has been no information at all about why there is this function not available. I went to bed and tried again on the next morning 8 o'clock. Again no chance to choose your preferred seat.
This forced me then to choose the next "convenient" channel, calling up the salespeople over there and asking what can they do for me. I expected that there must be an integrated system running in the background, so it would be easy for them to let me choose my seats and put them into my account to my "print@home"-list. Instead I get the information that this is not possible. They only can deposit me the tickets at the box office, so I would have to turn up half an hour earlier than I usual do, just to get my tickets.
This is something I can not believe in today's networked economy, especially for a company having a clear multi-channel strategy on serving customers. Integrating the quite new function of "print@home"-tickets into the system should not be that difficult and it is a duty anyway.
In the end I got my tickets, after I had visited every channel Ticketcorner offers. But even their sales partners, such as Swiss Post, have not been informed about the disfunction of the seat reserving system. So in the end I have been at two different point of sales personally, have had a phone call with a friendly lady and have spent a lot of time on the homepage of this company.
I hope not to make such a big effort the next time I need a ticket for an ice hockey match.
