So-called personalisation

In the job I have just left, I had several running battles, positioning myself as the defender of the website end-user against the Forces of Marketing. One of these was about site personalisation. Certain people seemed to wet their pants at this prospect, while I sat in the corner and said No, just... NO.

We got the phone bill last week, I paid it online via the Co-op Bank. You have to log in for that, but obviously there's a point to it, or else you could be paying any old person's phone bill, nice idea, but it won't catch on.

It was quite a hefty bill, though, and I noticed that only two of our 'friends and family' numbers are actually for current friends or family, so I thought I would follow their friendly advice and log into 'my bt.com' (or whatever they call it) and change them.

We have a broadband connection (a BT one, in fact). BT is a huge company with presumably a great deal invested in its online customer service. Could I get the fucking thing to work? No I could not.

First of all, I know I have been into this service before at some stage, but it might well have been from my previous abode, in which case the phone number and (possibly?) account number are different. It seemed to recognise one of my standard usernames, but not with one of my standard passwords, but it told me I could enter my account number and it would give me my password.

So I did, and it told me my account number wasn't valid. Which it most certainly is because I had just copied it straight off the bill, so either I had a different account number when I registered that username, or someone else is using that username. Either way, I wasn't getting anywhere.

So I tried to register again, filled in the form with all my details, some of them twice, and hit return. Nothing for a while, then a 'page cannot be displayed' error. So I went back and the form was empty. And I really could not be arsed filling it in again.

This is what happens with websites. Even when they're good, they're not very good. And at least if it had worked I would have got something out of it that would have saved me money. Who is going to bother to go through all of this to choose the type of content they see when they get to an organisation's homepage, compared, say, with clicking on something that looks interesting?

No one. And even if you do it once, even if your username and password doesn't go straight out of your head, will you do it twice? Will you arse. You'll go and do something less boring instead.

I know I am running registration and personalisation together, and I know about cookies and all that, but my point stands. And we will continue to have Liz's old house, my sister's long-gone Dutch flat and S's ex-boyfriend on our Friends & Family till the cows come home.

joella