Flowbird TVM usability: Railcards

[Adam Williams]

Do retail managers from train operating companies actually try and use the TVMs the company makes before they decide on the supplier?

I was using a Chiltern TVM yesterday and even just finding the 26-30 Railcard option is a real challenge amongst all the crap in the list.

I thought it was generally accepted in the retail world that you (sadly - this is the sort of thing there really needs to be better data for) do need to curate your own whitelist/allowlist of Railcards that you choose to expose. Some of the discounts in this list definitely should definitely not be publicly available for people to just apply on a whim.

TVM - Ticket vending machine

 

[Haywain]

Do retail managers from train operating companies actually try and use the TVMs the company makes before they decide on the supplier?

That depends on whether they were given the option by an incoming franchisee, or the machines had been purchased prior to the franchise award being finalised.

I thought it was generally accepted in the retail world that you (sadly - this is the sort of thing there really needs to be better data for) do need to curate your own whitelist/allowlist of Railcards that you choose to expose. Some of the discounts in this list definitely should definitely not be publicly available for people to just apply on a whim.

Agreed wholeheartedly. The data is full of rubbish though.

 

[Starmill]

Do retail managers from train operating companies actually try and use the TVMs the company makes before they decide on the supplier?

I was using a Chiltern TVM yesterday and even just finding the 26-30 Railcard option is a real challenge amongst all the crap in the list.

I thought it was generally accepted in the retail world that you (sadly - this is the sort of thing there really needs to be better data for) do need to curate your own whitelist/allowlist of Railcards that you choose to expose. Some of the discounts in this list definitely should definitely not be publicly available for people to just apply on a whim.

TVM - Ticket vending machine

It appears that the vast majority of those discounts wouldn't even be available for whatever ticket you were trying to buy? For many of those the machine won't even be capable of issuing the tickets to which those discounts could apply...

 

[CyrusWuff]

That depends on whether they were given the option by an incoming franchisee, or the machines had been purchased prior to the franchise award being finalised.

In the case of the Chiltern machines, it was a joint procurement with Northern (which was an Arriva TOC at the time.)

That doesn't excuse the lack of blacklisting for discounts that shouldn't be shown, however.

 

[Wallsendmag]

I’ve just had the same chat with the supplier a couple of weeks ago. For some reason all the available discounts were being displayed

 

[talldave]

Do retail managers from train operating companies actually try and use the TVMs the company makes before they decide on the supplier?

I was using a Chiltern TVM yesterday and even just finding the 26-30 Railcard option is a real challenge amongst all the crap in the list.

I thought it was generally accepted in the retail world that you (sadly - this is the sort of thing there really needs to be better data for) do need to curate your own whitelist/allowlist of Railcards that you choose to expose. Some of the discounts in this list definitely should definitely not be publicly available for people to just apply on a whim.

TVM - Ticket vending machine

Absolutely appalling . And of course should the unfortunate customer inadvertently make the wrong choice they could incur the wrath of the TOC's persecution department. And yes, I spelt that correctly!

 

[Adam Williams]

I’ve just had the same chat with the supplier a couple of weeks ago. For some reason all the available discounts were being displayed

Oh dear, so they do already know about it and it's still a problem. Certainly it's been like it for a long time at Chiltern stations, I only took video of it recently though.

I had a play yesterday to try and get some tickets issued. The majority of the selections do seemingly result in an "Unknown Railcard" error later on in the checkout flow (which begs the question of why they're displayed in the first place if it does have some list of "known" railcards), but I was able to find at least one entry which did yield a 75% discount and I thought was not supposed to be issued from self-service machines.

 

[DelW]

I've sometimes thought that, now the list of railcards is often longer than can be displayed in the available window, should they be displayed not in alphabetical order, but in order of popularity (i.e. frequency of selection)?

It would help with the OP's issue, and would benefit the majority of customers, at the cost of possibly making it more awkward for holders of less common cards.

 

[OscarH]

I've sometimes thought that, now the list of railcards is often longer than can be displayed in the available window, should they be displayed not in alphabetical order, but in order of popularity (i.e. frequency of selection)?

It would help with the OP's issue, and would benefit the majority of customers, at the cost of possibly making it more awkward for holders of less common cards.

The way a lot of online retailers do it is by having a "popular" and an "other" category, the popular category coming first. You can then order alphabetical within the categories for ease of finding things, but the really common ones are still at the top

 

[Egg Centric]

I've sometimes thought that, now the list of railcards is often longer than can be displayed in the available window, should they be displayed not in alphabetical order, but in order of popularity (i.e. frequency of selection)?

It would help with the OP's issue, and would benefit the majority of customers, at the cost of possibly making it more awkward for holders of less common cards.

I have a suggestion to swap the order of 16-17 and 16-25 cards, to prevent user of the latter inadvertently selecting the former and almost inevitably being PFd if caught. Although it's unclear how many of these accidents are actually accidental...

 

[Bletchleyite]

I have a suggestion to swap the order of 16-17 and 16-25 cards, to prevent user of the latter inadvertently selecting the former and almost inevitably being PFd if caught. Although it's unclear how many of these accidents are actually accidental...

I suspect precisely none of them.

 

[Egg Centric]

I suspect precisely none of them.

While something close to that (I'm sure you don't mean literally precisely none, given the millions of creative ways people manage to find to screw up) wouldn't exactly surprise me, I'm rather less cynical and personally guess at around 5-10% of it being genuine error. Swapping them around should eliminate the main cause of that error so it would imo be a useful experiment.